Posted on 01/22/2005 6:31:49 PM PST by Former Military Chick
A New Jersey jury has assessed $105 million in compensatory and punitive damages against Aramark Corp., the nation's leading arena concessionaire, in the case of a girl paralyzed in a crash with a driver drunk on beer served at a Giants football game.
The father of the victim says the award will make liquor vendors and arenas do a better job of enforcing their rules against selling alcohol to fans who appear to be intoxicated. The evidence in the case against Aramark showed the driver had consumed the equivalent of 16 12-ounce beers, mostly at Giants Stadium in the Hackensack Meadlowlands.
"In a few months, you're going to see major changes in the way concessionaires do business," the plaintiff's father, Ronald Verni of Cliffside Park, N.J., said at a news conference Thursday. "They will need to show more responsibility, and their insurers will insist on it."
On Tuesday, a Bergen County, N.J., jury awarded $60 million in compensatory damages to Verni's paralyzed daughter, Antonia, now 7, and other family members, splitting the liability 50-50 between Aramark and Daniel Lanzaro of Cresskill, N.J., the drunken driver.
On Wednesday, the jury assessed $75 million in punitive damages against Aramark, bringing the company's obligations in the case to $105 million, plus about $6 million in prejudgment interest.
Lanzaro, who had been at a Giants game earlier in the day, struck the Vernis' car as they were driving home from a pumpkin-picking trip on Oct. 24, 1999. Antonia, 2 at the time, is a quadriplegic and needs a ventilator to breathe. Her mother, Fazila, also was seriously injured but has recovered.
Evidence presented during the four-week trial by plaintiffs lawyer David Mazie showed that Aramark vendors repeatedly violated rules against selling more than two beers to a single patron at a time. There were few instances, in what Mazie called "the culture of intoxication" at the stadium, in which drunken patrons were stopped from ordering more drinks, the plaintiffs' evidence showed. "The name of the game was to sell as much beer as possible," he says.
Lanzaro, who settled for his policy limits of $100,000 and is serving a five-year sentence for vehicular assault, testified for the plaintiff that he was served at the game while visibly drunk. Friends and relatives supported his testimony. At the time of the accident, he had a blood alcohol concentration of about .266, twice the legal limit at the time and three times the limit under current law.
The best witness for the plaintiff was Antonia Lanzaro. Her stoic testimony about life in a wheelchair, unable to move her body, and the constant attention required of patients on a ventilator, had the jurors in tears.
Mazie says he knows of no larger dram shop award in the country, and no larger personal injury verdict of any kind in New Jersey. The previous high in the state was a $75.9 million award last November to an infant who became paralyzed after errors in treatment at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, N.J.
At Aramark, in Philadelphia, spokeswoman Debbie Albert said, "We are disappointed by the size of the verdict and intend to appeal.” The company also said in an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday that it has "adequate insurance and other resources to address this matter." Aramark earned $10 billion last year.
Defense counsel Keith Harris of Livingston's Braff, Harris & Sukoneck said in an interview on Thursday that while he can't speak for Aramark about the import of the case, he does believe there are several grounds for appeal.
First, he says Judge Edward Donohue erred by not allowing the jury to consider liability against a club, which Lanzaro visited after the game and where employees poured drinks that Lanzaro and his friends had brought in. The club was dismissed from the case and the judge left it off the verdict sheet on grounds that it was not a dram shop and therefore not reasonably liable, Harris says.
He says the judge should have allowed testimony about two previous drunken driving convictions against Lanzano -- evidence that was ruled to be inflammatory. He says he also is troubled by a ruling that prevented him from telling the jury that Antonia was belted, but not in a car seat, and about a ruling that made it difficult for the defense to pursue cross claims against the Giants and the National Football League.
The team and the league were defendants but they settled for an undisclosed sum and were let out on summary judgment before the trial.
Mazie says he doubts the appeal will be successful, adding that the size of the verdict is unassailable. The punitive damages award of $75 million -- 2 1/2 times the compensatory award -- is well within New Jersey law that caps punitive damages at five times compensatories.
He says the compensatory award is within the $22 million to $42 million range Antonia will need for a lifetime of care, according to testimony by both sides' economic and health care experts.
During Thursday's news conference, Verni said the family would use some of the money to fund stem cell research that might provide a cure for Antonia's quadriplegia, and he called on Aramark to contribute.
I found the following articles on the subject:
60M award to N.J. girl paralyzed by a drunk
Vendors' role in crash goes to jury
Expert: $135M Verdict In Alcohol Case Should Send Wakeup Call To Teams
Aramark is a publicly traded corporation. This judgement is going to hurt the shareholders (who are innocent), the other several thousand employees besides the one who may have been irresponsible albeit not as irresponsible as the drunk, and the other customers who may see their costs rise.
The victim is not going to be helped any more by $105 million than she would by the $22 million (and even that's probably inflated).
Who's going to benefit? It starts with a L, so you'd be correct with either "leech" or "lawyer".
I doubt if that if it was your daughter who died you would be quite so callous.
I'm also willing to bet that if it was your daughter you would be more than happy to accept the check. In fact you would probably hold out for more.
Oh by the way the /bad sarcasm tag is pretty lame. We all know you were completely serious.
The last time I attended a Royals game was 20 years ago, so I bet the cost has gone up, we hope to attend before we reutrn to Maryland.
Speaking of Maryland my beloved is a huge Os fan. We have attended many games and I have seen the vendors selling beer, there are many in line, how do they time to check all the faces they are serving. Oh and the beer was 6.00 frankly way costly in my humble opinion.
By mad mothers' way of thinking, guilt can be extrapolated to us all. So let's build a colosseum and crucify us all in public. ...the perfect passion play.
Excellent comment and I do agree with you on all points.
As a civil trial opened Wednesday in Superior Court in Hackensack, the first witness for the Verni family was Daniel Lanzaro, the drunken driver, who is still in prison. Lanzaro is a defendant, but is penniless and is testifying willingly.Posted here.He testified that Aramark concession stands - contrary to state law and the company's internal rules - sold alcohol at the stadium to visibly intoxicated patrons.
"Were you ever served alcohol when you were intoxicated?" attorney David Mazie said.
"Every time," Lanzaro replied.
"Have you ever been refused drinks at Giants Stadium?" "Never."
"Have you ever seen anyone being refused drinks at Giants Stadium?" "Never."
Lanzaro, 35, who is married with two young sons, was an alcoholic who had a habit of drinking a beer every five to 10 minutes once he got started.
On Wednesday, he told jurors that he went to a Giants game in East Rutherford on the morning of Oct. 24, 1999, and began drinking at around 11 a.m. at a tailgate party in the stadium parking lot.
By the time he left around 3 p.m., the 5-foot-5, 145-pound carpenter had guzzled nearly three six-packs of beer, most of it inside the stadium.
He said he then went to two Bergen County go-go bars with a friend, drinking more beer at one of them.
"I was done. Full. Content. Drunk," said Lanzaro, speaking in a barely audible voice, at times choking up and breaking into tears.
When pressed to remember how many beers he had that day, Lanzaro snapped: "I don't know numbers, but I know what I did.
"I was s---faced," he said. "It was more beers than I can handle."
Because they are not allowed to sell more than two beers to a person at a time. No matter if he were buying for his friends or not. They can only sell him two. If his friends wanted some they would have had to purchase them in person themselves. He bribed the attendent with a $10 tip to sell him six. If they had stuck to the 2-beer per-person rule they would not owe $105 million.
But "he" obviously wasn't obeying Aramark's rules either. An individual employee of a large corporation broke the rules of the stadium and thus of the concessionaire. Did he check with his boss to get permission to accept the bribe?
But it's the corporation and its shareholders who end up losing hugely rather than the individual who was actually guilty.
I doubt the guilty party (who really is the idiot who drove drunk but secondarily the one who accepted a bribe from him) had deep enough pockets though, so they go after the vendor.
They don't have to check the faces -- they have to abide by the rule that says no more than two beers can be sold to a single person at a time. They took a $10 bribe to violate that rule. Had they stuck to it, they would not owe $105 million.
Well how about shifting some of the liability to the manufacturer of the booze, Big Alcohol?
Naaaaa......
Then Aramak needs to institute a management strategy that will stop an employee from violating the rules.
http://user.pa.net/~nrwing/damm/
DAMM, Pennsylvania
Drunks Against Mad Mothers
The three-fold mission of DAMM of PA is to get mad mothers to stay at home and cook and clean where they belong, to stop drinking and driving because you might spill some, and to prevent other alcohol abuse like returning the keg before it's been emptied.
Impressive statistics.
It's illegal to sell alcohol to someone who is drunk. It's against stadium rules to sell more than two beers to a person at a time. Aramak violated both of those. Which stadium rule or state law did the alcohol manufacturer break? Had they put gasoline in a bottle labeled "beer" then you would have a case.
Later in the article, Lanzaro is referred to as Lanzano.
So you would be satisfied trying to pay for the medical costs of your brain damaged, paraplegic daughter with the proceeds from the auction of a used car?
You seem to want to let the vender off the hook.
A 'national' vending company whose object is to pour as much beer in a two hour period as they can, regardless of the consequences is innocent in your eyes?
In posts 1,2 and 5 you refer to it as a bar. I'm not sure that's how I'd refer to the food and beverage vendor at a pro football stadium which was violating the stadium rules.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1323818/posts
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