LAWYER who will go nameless called our attention to a recent court case, having seen a summary of it in The New York Law Journal. He was, to put it mildly, flummoxed. Posted on 06/25/2002 2:41:37 AM PDT by sarcasm
LAWYER who will go nameless called our attention to a recent court case, having seen a summary of it in The New York Law Journal. He was, to put it mildly, flummoxed.
A State Supreme Court jury in Manhattan had awarded $14.1 million to a woman who was hit by an E train. The accident occurred on May 3, 2000, in a subway tunnel just north of the 34th Street station on the Eighth Avenue line.
The woman, who will also go nameless to spare her further pain, suffered terribly. The only part of her right hand left intact was the thumb. She had skull fractures and broken facial bones and cuts all over, to list but a few of her injuries. She will be permanently scarred.
Only a heart of flint could not feel for her.
But only a head of stone could ignore an obvious question: What was she doing in that strange place to begin with?
It seems the woman, then 36, had entered the tunnel and lain down on the tracks. The police concluded later that she was trying to kill herself. She denied it, though she also said she could not remember how she had ended up there. Her family told the police that she was severely depressed, The Law Journal said. Evidence was submitted that she suffered from postpartum depression, two months after having a baby. Her denials notwithstanding, the authorities saw an attempted suicide.
About six minutes before the accident, the police got a 911 call from someone who had seen her lying there while he was aboard a train passing along a parallel track. Subway managers sent out an alert. The E train operator heard it. He tried to keep his speed under 10 miles per hour, he testified. When he spotted the woman, he said, he was going faster than that, between 10 and 15 miles an hour.
That speed complied with the rules, a New York City Transit superintendent testified. All the same, the jury accepted expert testimony that under the circumstances, the operator should have been able to stop his train in time had he been going 10 m.p.h. or less.
The bottom line, to use that clich
I think I'll print it out...
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