While the Rincon story was a horrible tragedy and I’m glad Rumsey was found at fault, this verdict amounts to a $25 tax on every person in the city of Tucson. Thanks, judge-and-jury, this is just what we need in the midst of an economic recession. I hope the city appeals the case, and this amount is reduced by an order of magnitude.
Calculation: The population of Tucson is 535,000, according to Wikipedia. ($40 million / 3) / 535,000 people = $25/person.
I have to agree. While my heart goes out to the family, it sure is a shame that they let some lawyer (sorry Erik, but this is the sort of nonsense that gives all lawyers a bad name) talk them into including a “defendant” that had no hand in this tragedy, just to deepen the pockets. How many millions of drivers a year are able to safely navigate that lane reduction? The lane reduction is not a surprise, all that’s needed is to not be drunk and to pay attention – something that we should hold all drivers fully accountable for no matter the conditions. Now, every taxpaying citizen in Tucson who is not a drunk driver is being wrongfully punished for the actions of one who is. This also opens the door for every drunk driver to wrongfully spread the blame around to try and take some of the heat off from where it truly belongs.
This amount will surely be appealed. I can’t imagine attorneys for the city or Glenda Rumsey letting this go.
But this amount will be a wake up call for the city. During a budget crisis is exactly the time to make sure that things don’t get cut that are very important to public safety, even if it is a neglected minority like cyclists.
I am a little surprised to find this much empathy with the city. I am so frustrated with streets that are made extremely dangerous by poor planning during construction and after. If contractors treated cars the same way they treated bicycles, people would be at city hall with torches.
I can’t say that I am that surprised. It doesn’t sound like an equal burden for Glenda Rumsey and the City. Glenda probably doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around and she is going to spend a long time in prison.
All of this sounds like trying to put the water back in the dam after it has burst. My heart goes out to the family. I can’t imagine what I would do or how I would feel if my teenager were killed while riding his bike.
I’m always amused that someone who reads a newspaper article thinks that they know better than jurors who listened to an entire trial’s worth of evidence that was admitted by a judge according to the law. And, then they blame lawyers for an outcome they don’t agree with!
Everyone seems to be focusing on the $13 mil being charged to the city, but maybe this will call attention to the fact that even though Tucson is a “bicycle-friendly city” there are still some dangerous streets. Fatalities and bicycle friendliness don’t really go together.
How about someone who navigates that stretch of road on a regular basis and just doesn’t see a real problem there for non-drunk drivers? I can’t help but wonder if everyone who can say that was Voir-Dire’d out of the jury pool.
Some things judt don’t pass the smell test no matter what the paper chooses to report.
And as to assigning equal blame to the city and the cyclist, it doesn’t really work that way. “Blame” in this case is cash awards. And you can only award as much cash as the entity has to take. Glenda Rumsey does not have $13 million in assets. But her insurance company may cover a portion of that. So whether it’s 13 million or 13 billion, it really doesn’t matter, you can realistically only go for whatever her liability will cover.
The liability should stop with the person who put the vehicle out there when it shouldn’t be out there. She wasn’t by law suppose to behind the wheel. Even if the person was sober and not distracted they would still need to control their vehicle by law. So it comes down to getting CASH. Tucson is easier to pursue.
City engineers testified that they KNEW they had cut corners by not widening the road enough at the merge point where young Jose was killed. They also testified with ARROGANCE about how it really wasn’t that important, even AFTER a boy minding his own business was killed in the bike lane.
The Rincons didn’t ask for this $ amount. They wanted to bring attention to the issue to hopefully keep someone else from dying in the future. It was the CITIZEN JURY that awarded this amount to them after it heard testimony from your moronic government officials. The fact that the award is so large should tell you how absolutely disgusted the jurists were with the City’s arrogance and negligence in this case.
Want to be angry with someone? Be angry with the City of Tucson and it’s decision to treat a young boy’s death in such a cavalier manner.
I sure would like to see a transcript of that trial. In every public account I’ve seen or heard of the incident so far, it’s been reported that the boys weren’t even in the bike lane, but rather well off the road on the shoulder – is that now not the case? If they truly weren’t on the road, then it doesn’t even matter what the road design is or how arrogant any city employee may or may not have been. We should keep the blame where it truly belongs – if Rumsey had been sober and attentive, she would’ve seen the clearly marked lane reduction as easily as everyone else does on a regular basis, and this wouldn’t have happened.
The City reduced the merge lane by five feet, disregarding the standard widths recognized by highway safety engineers for a lane merge of this kind. He was hit on the right front corner of the drunk’s car. The five feet expansion that City engineers ignored would have put the bike lane five feet wider to the right, might have placed him wider than front right corner of the car and might have saved his life.
Still, City engineers testified that they did nothing wrong. Hense, a thoroughly disgusted jury levied the largest punishment in Tucon’s history.
Possibly, but it’s still far more accurate to say that if Rumsey hadn’t been drinking, that would have been far more likely to have saved his life than the futile effort of trying to anticipate and build around the potential swerving path of random drunk drivers. The city engineers weren’t at fault, so of course they would testify to that belief. If the jurors were disgusted by such then they were levying a judgment based on emotion and not logic.
Scott, I think what happened here is the jurors felt that if the roadway had not been negligently designed, Rincon would still be alive, and the negligent design contributed to Rincon’s death in equal measure to Rumsey’s intoxication.
Rumsey was the bad actor in all of this — that’s why she is in prison — but assigning fault is a different matter. I am not saying my gut agrees with this award, but it is not completely irrational. The jurors were there and they heard the story, and we did not. All sides had an opportunity for voir dire.
I wish the City had designed the road according to safety specs and young Jose Rincon was still alive and Rumsey was not in prison and none of it had happened. As Rincon Sr. put it, so many lives were affected by this.
And that’s why we have safety standards on roadways. It is foreseeable that drunk drivers will be driving on them, and we make certain judgment calls about how drunk-driver-proof we want our roads to be. In this case, the City ignored those judgment calls and the jury thought it mattered.
It’s difficult to assess the reasonable
expectations associated with any of the
events that contributed to this tragedy;
although bad things could have happened,
individually, from any of them.
Rumsey hadn’t killed anyone before while
driving drunk (although we know drunk
drivers cause problems). Her life results
in a huge change.
Chuy’s may have never over-served anyone
before that resulted in a death, although
they should be keenly aware of the drinking-
driving effect. We hope their policies have
changed.
Faced with the argument that bad things can
happen anytime, parents are reluctant to set
after-dark curfews for young teens. We can
hope some parents are influenced to do so
from this incident.
But the city has likely never faced a death
before from shortchanging a temporary
construction design. There probably aren’t
any design guidelines for accommodating
drunk driving skills.
This award approaches setting the city up
for responsibility along the lines that alcohol
sellers face in some areas.
Changes in their procedures will still be
difficut to justify even from this incident.
Some changes may be put into affect; but, like
the Olive tunnel on campus, may fade out over
time.
It’s really up to enforcement to remove drunk
drivers from the road, rather than highway
departments duty to accommodate them.
The award is a jury knee-jerk reaction.
“This award approaches setting the city up for responsibility along the lines that alcohol sellers face in some areas.”
I’m sure that might even be what the jury was thinking, but far more likely to happen (because it is the cheaper and easier path) is that the city will become more litigation-leery, come to the inevitable realization that the existence of “official” bicycle infrastructure can be too easily construed by a jury as a de-facto admission of responsibility for safety from threats that are out of the city’s control, and do the predictable CYA of pulling infrastructure and possibly even prohibiting the operation of bicycles on some (or many) roads. There is already talk that the planned Cylovia is now an issue because the city can’t afford the risk, right up until this decision that wasn’t the case.
This is the inevitable result of the concept of idiotproofing – it only succeeds at promoting the popularity of the logically flawed idea that if someone screws up, it becomes less and less that someone’s fault; and more and more the fault of whatever inanimate object they misused to do the damage, and the manufacturer or supplier of that object for failing to accurately predict the true depth of human stupidity or the multitude of ways that object could be misused. One simply cannot build a road that is safe from drunk drivers – it’s easy to point fingers after the fact and say “you should’ve done this” but next week another drunk driver will find some more resourceful way to ignore the reasonable precautions already in place that have worked for years, and the process starts all over again with the public expecting the supplier of the roads* to shoulder more responsibility, and the drunk driver to shoulder less.
(*I.e. us. Let’s not forget here that no city employee will (or can) be held financially responsible for this bill – this is a judgment against you and I and everybody else who didn’t design or build the road, even though we posses no real power over said employees other than pressure on elected officials who in reality have no direct control over city employees either.)
Scott, so why even have safety standards for roads at all? If your point is that drunk drivers will kill kids in bike lanes no matter how a road is designed, then why even expend the revenue to employ safety engineers to design roads at all?
Your argument would be more convincing if the road that the alcoholic Rumsey was driving that night actually met the accepted safety standards that engineers use to design roads in every state in this country. It didn’t. Not even close. The “reasonable precautions already in place that have worked for years” were NOT in place. The City was responsible for this. Drunk driver or not, the jury obviously felt that the City cut corners, and that, coupled with the insufferable arrogance of the testimony of City engineers, really pissed them off.
And with all due respect, saying that you and I should not be held financially responsible because we “didn’t design or build the road” is a cop out. In a democratic society, we are responsible, and sadly, change in public policy only happens when people feel the financial pinch (and punishment) for the decisions and behavior of our government employees. The jury had no problem sending this message. Neither do I.
That there is an arbitrary standard in place that the road didn’t meet (i.e. theoretical ideal) is different from the reasonable precautions that *were* in place that actually *have* worked for years as evidenced by the fact that pretty much everybody else, even Rumsey herself when she was sober, seems to have been able to see the signs and lane markings and safely navigate this lane reduction for as long as it has existed – otherwise known as reality. Lower the bar, lower the expectations on the drivers, and you only really lower the effort and the result to the detriment of us all.
I don’t take this position lightly, I’ve been hit by drunk drivers twice myself while riding a motorcycle – both times interestingly enough while waiting for a red light that the approaching driver behind me couldn’t be bothered to notice. In both cases the traffic light was not the biggest, brightest, and hardest to ignore that is available, and I probably could have made a successful case in either incident that the local authority was “cutting corners” by failing to install the best available. It certainly would’ve made a big difference in my life to do so, but it is my deeply held belief – derived from years of observation – that it is this depersonalization of responsibility that is the root cause of much of what we all dislike about society today. Just 50 years ago, the notion that a road feature that everyone in town has safely used for years is somehow responsible for the actions of a drunk that left the road there would’ve elicited scoff and derision from the average citizen. Today it’s commonly accepted that if you refuse to learn it’s the school system’s fault; that if you buy more stuff on borrowed money than you can afford to pay back it’s the bank’s fault; that if you get lung cancer after knowing since the ’40s that those “coffin nails” you’ve been sucking down will kill you, it’s the tobacco company’s fault; that if you can’t be bothered to control your eating it’s McDonald’s fault; etc. etc. ad nauseum – it’s OK to keep making worse and worse life-choices because there is always somebody else that can be blamed to duck responsibility and make ourselves feel better. A settlement like this might benefit in the short-term those people that may truly deserve compensation, it’s even possible that it might result in better temporary performance from the city – although as I said above it’s far more likely to trigger the unintended consequence of a backlash against bicyclists – but in the long-run it just keeps lowering the bar and promoting the idea that we’re not really responsible for our own actions – government/business/parents/teachers/insert-blame-target-here are; we increasingly get the resulting society that such an attitude breeds, and we somehow can’t figure out why everyone is becoming so greedy, selfish, irresponsible and generally uncivil.
I agree with many of your points and share your frustration about passing the buck, and we can discuss for days of what a “safety” standard for sober drivers on the road is. But if there IS a road safety standard in place (which there is) and the City ignores it and a loss is suffered by a responsible, tax-paying family, shouldn’t SOMEONE be held responsible for ignoring that standard??
We have safety standards for a reason. Just because no one is killed on a bicycle for years and years at that particular merge doesn’t mean the road is safe. It could just mean that drivers have not been driving drunk and/or have been lucky for years and years. Jose Rincon Sr. said it himself…it was the “perfect storm” that night: greedy Chuy’s + drunk driver + crummy road design = tragic death.
The moral of the story is this: cover your ass. Do the right thing. Don’t cut corners. If you ignore safety standards, you do so at your own peril. If you sell food that isn’t really food, the same risk. Loan money to people who you know can’t pay it back, same. Make cigarettes, be ready. You may get away with it for years, but when the “perfect storm” hits and you then choose to trot out your arrogant engineers to downplay a boy’s death, you will be served.
In a way, those 12 jurors just happening to all be on the same jury for this trial was a perfect storm in and of itself.
What more accurate safety standard can you set but that which has been tested and proven over time to work in the real world without problem for the vast majority of users? Anything needlessly more stringent that was likely devised by committee and delivered by decree is often just that – CYA set to the lowest common denominator. And that denominator just keeps getting lower and more common every time we endorse the idea that the collective is somehow responsible for the actions of the individual. At one time, the national 55mph speed limit was touted as a “safety standard” – the fact that it existed as a national standard and that the states were blackmailed into enforcing it as such does not mean that it was any safer or led to a reduction in highway deaths over the previously proven reality; in fact it turned out that the opposite was true. Once again, when you expect less of people – that’s exactly what you get. We keep proving that to ourselves over and over again, and when the concept always inevitably fails and we wind up worse off instead of better, we think it’s because we haven’t taken it far enough yet. So here we go once again.
Are you an engineer? Safety standards, including civil engineering safety standards, are evidence based. This means that the standards are very, very thoroughly researched and vetted. These engineers either chose (or were more likely pressured) to cut corners to reduce costs. Some states even have laws against building civil structures which do not meet safety standards. So it is absolutely true that the city was negligent by not building to the standards. That is the definition of negligence. The amount is high in my opinion, but it will be appealed. Hopefully it sends a message. It doesn’t matter what political affiliation a person is, we all must agree, no we must demand, that civil infrastructure be safe. And it’s not as if it is a difficult problem to accomplish, the standards exist.
You’re right. We really don’t need safety standards, or if we do, we should relax them. If a driver thinks he/she can successfully make it home without them, he/she should be allowed to try without the City being held responsible. So to test this, go ahead and drive home on the other side of the yellow line tomorrow. That whole “separate the flow of traffic for safety” is ridiculous anyway. We shouldn’t expect less from people who could probably do it.
I think it’s really easy to tout theory when your child hasn’t been murdered because civil servants felt than the established safety guidelines for designing a merging traffic lane didn’t apply to them. Sorry, but if I’m ever faced with even remotely the same scenario and the City of Tucson is negligent this way, I will SUE THE HELL out of the City of Tucson. It’s good to know that others ($40 million jury) feel the same way.
JB, not even close to my point and you know it, which is a sure sign that you really have nothing of substance to support your opinion, such as showing that this lane reduction *hasn’t* proven trouble-free for the vast majority of users all this time. Like say, a list of police callouts to that location, a collection of dated weekly photos of different fresh tire-tracks cutting across that dirt corner, or a private surreptitiously placed traffic-cam counting up the percentage of drivers that “oops” that spot even when there is nobody there to see it. Seriously – it bothers me to see any attention or fault at all in this case focused away from the person who made a conscious decision to guzzle her way to three times the legal limit, fumble her way into her car and go careening down the road; it saddens me to witness the constant societal march away from personal responsibility towards collective blame; but it just appalls me that there are too many people who are seemingly unable to make the very real distinction between that which proves to be safe in real life and an arbitrary CYA requirement set by some bureaucratic agency.
If the city loses this appeal please let it be because it was proven to a thinking jury that this lane reduction is indeed dangerous in real life and not because they were too busy having their heart-strings tugged to even bother considering such trivialities as facts and logic.
And Red, I agree that the gas “crisis” was the motivation, but where I lived it was sold and tenaciously clung to as a safety measure. I have a fond memory from when it first passed of standing on the side of the road trying not to smile while receiving the standard-issue “blood on the highway” safety lecture from a trooper who stopped me for doing 57 in a 55 on a road which just two weeks before had been a 65.
Not sure why you can’t open up to the possibility that BOTH personal responsibility AND City negligence can play a role sometimes. Maybe not all the time, but some of the time, like in this case. It appears that this jury considers both to be a factor.
Scott, your problem seems to be with the safety standards themselves, not the jury. I don’t know what the jury instructions were in this case, but they were likely something along the lines of: “Did the City follow safety standards? If not, did their failure to follow those standards contribute to the collision? By what percentage?”
The City is welcome not to follow engineering guidelines, but doing so opens them up to lawsuits, because those engineering guidelines are put together by teams of bureaucrats who have a lot of information at their disposal. It seems you believe that in this case the standards were too strict because prior to Rincon’s death the road was safe.
But that’s a line-drawing problem, not an absolute problem as you are characterizing it. You just want the line to be drawn a little further to the left or right. Surely you do believe in some degree of safety standards? And that there should be some liability for not following them?
(Maybe you don’t. There are countries in the world that have no tort liability system, where you are always responsible for your own injuries and there is no or little bureaucratic oversight of things like highway design. But I suspect you wouldn’t want to live in those places.)
Yes, it’s a very fuzzy line….
It was far more reasonable for
the city to expect no problems
from the road conditions there
than for Chuy’s or Rumsey to
expect there would be no pro-
blems from their action. In
holding the road equally
accountable, the jury does not
allow for exercise of the user’s
judgement. They’re not all equally
accountable. Aren’t we expected to
use our judgement for existing
conditions? This jury says no.
The government must have it all
perfect for us so we don’t have
to pay attention. This award is
not about safety and the longer this
thread goes, the easier that is to
see. To carry it all the way would
require that the city be sued for
every section of road that doesn’t
come up to the the almighty safety
standards. You wanna go there?
This is why I mentioned wanting to read the transcript. The city has been proclaimed to be as equally negligent as an extremely drunk driver, yet to all appearances actual negligence on the city’s part remains unproven. All that’s been established is that this lane reduction was constructed differently than an arbitrary standard that is held up as the norm for such features. This is not anywhere near the same as “is it safe?” or “were they negligent?” As I alluded to above, it would be incredibly easy and inexpensive for a good lawyer to show documentation that the reduction is actually unsafe. Imagine how dramatic and damning it would be to be able to show video or stills of multiple cars nearly blowing the change while cutting through the empty bike lane – especially following the engineer’s testimony. Doesn’t seem like a trick that a successful personal injury guy who’s goal is to maximize jury empathy would miss, so the fact that he pursued the far less visceral “standards” route instead most likely means that he *did* look into it and came up with nothing shocking to show – i.e. he discovered that the reduction *isn’t* inherently unsafe.
It is highly possible that I’m all wet here – all I can know for certain about that reduction is that I personally have witnessed and experienced no problems there in all the years I’ve been using that road on bicycle or motorcycle. Nor have I heard anyone else ever complain about any safety issue there until a drunk driver caused a tragedy and then tried to use the road design as an excuse. If I’m wrong about that all that needs to be done is to at least show some sort of actual proof that the reduction is not safe. I’d still believe that this contributes to the erosion of personal accountability of the drunk driver, but at least then you’d have a leg to stand on as to whether the city holds any actual liability or if this bridge was constructed simply to deepen the pot.
In that case your problem is with our system of law. In American tort law there is something called “negligence per se,” which basically says that in many cases if you don’t meet a legal standard, your behavior is presumed to be negligent (the degree has to be determined by a jury of course). I don’t know if in this case the City’s failure to follow the standard was determined to be negligence per se or not, but I suspect it was.
Negligence per se says for example if you were going 25 mph in a school zone and you injure someone there, you are a priori negligent and we don’t have to spend a lot of time at trial proving that going 25 in a school zone is dangerous. It just is, by law, because that determination has already been made.
Maybe you and everyone you know has driven 25mph in school zones every day of your life and never hit anybody, but it won’t persuade a court that the behavior is reasonable.
So you are only correct that their negligence was “unproven” in the sense that they didn’t have to prove something that you think they should have had to prove. You’ll have to take that up with 100+ years of American jurisprudence. (A few more Allitos and Thomases on the Supreme Court might do that for you.)
Also, you keep calling this an “arbitrary” standard, but it wasn’t arbitrary as in “made up” by the jury. It was a published design standard that road builders are supposed to adhere to, but in this case did not.
Oh, I see now – they don’t have to actually *be* negligent or do anything that’s real-world unsafe as long as they merely fail to CYA so as to leave an opening that allows them to be *portrayed* as negligent.
Yeah, that convinces me that this wasn’t just pocket-deepening. That stuff I said earlier about the depersonalization of responsibility being the downfall of civil society? I take it all back – my eyes have been opened.
Another example of negligence per se is of course driving drunk. A victim of a drunk driver doesn’t have to prove that *this particular driver* is impaired when drunk, even if that driver can get up and testify — even if they can *prove* — that they drive drunk all the time and never hit anything.
Negligence per se saves plaintiffs from having to present endless proofs of every element.
“…it would be incredibly easy and inexpensive for a good lawyer to show documentation that the reduction is actually unsafe. Imagine how dramatic and damning it would be to be able to show video or stills of multiple cars nearly blowing the change while cutting through the empty bike lane – especially following the engineer’s testimony. Doesn’t seem like a trick that a successful personal injury guy who’s goal is to maximize jury empathy would miss, so the fact that he pursued the far less visceral “standards” route instead most likely means that he *did* look into it and came up with nothing shocking to show – i.e. he discovered that the reduction *isn’t* inherently unsafe.”
This is EXACTLY what happened in Rumsey’s criminal trial (which I witnessed from the courtroom gallery). Pics and video footage were presented by Rumsey’s attorney to try and show that the merge wasn’t safe. I am not a lawyer, but I remember thinking to myself, “He’s opening the door to other contributing factors for the accident now.” Turned out to be true and this other contributing evidence was used in the civil trial. Then when the the City engineer who approved the design was called to the stand to testify, he came off like a defensive ass. Probably the same guy was called for the civil trial. It appears from the verdict that the City of Tucson didn’t even ask him to tone down his arrogance for the civil trial, and it cost them $40 mil. What a bunch of boobs.
This doesn’t mean Rumsey wasn’t guilty, just that the City didn’t do it’s job either.
“Oh, I see now – they don’t have to actually *be* negligent or do anything that’s real-world unsafe as long as they merely fail to CYA so as to leave an opening that allows them to be *portrayed* as negligent.”
That’s right, Scott. As a civilized society, we shouldn’t have to experience a tragic death or a near miss at a lane merge before understanding if it’s safe or not. Safety standards are developed based on years and years of other tragic deaths to hopefully PREVENT future deaths. That’s what an intelligent society tries to do…learn from previous mistakes.
Of course, if you know of another potentially dangerous driving hazard that the City chose to cut corners to design, you could always “real world” test it by putting your child on a bicycle there to see what happens. No? Didn’t think so…
What about the road hazards that we
negotiate on a daily basis? If a drunk
driver forces a cyclist onto the
trolley tracks in avoidance and they
fall and die, what kind of negligence,
if any, is that. Has the city
acknowledged tracks are unsafe by
means of signage. Are tracks acceptably
unsafe? If something is demonstratively
unsafe to a percentage of road users,
is the city liable if they go ahead and
install more?
“If I’m wrong about that all that needs to be done is to at least show some sort of actual proof that the reduction is not safe. I’d still believe that this contributes to the erosion of personal accountability of the drunk driver, but at least then you’d have a leg to stand on as to whether the city holds any actual liability or if this bridge was constructed simply to deepen the pot.”
So you have a leg. This is why I said I wanted to see the transcript. Of course this would apply only if the jury for the civil trial was allowed access to this evidence, because if what Erik said is true – if a jury is indeed not allowed to consider the actual safety of the feature in question, but are only there to rubberstamp whether they heard it presented into evidence that said feature didn’t meet a standard, again without being allowed even to consider the applicability of that standard, I have a hard time understanding why we continue to maintain the pretense of a jury system at all.
Either way I’m still not convinced that the city is equally liable as an extreme DUI merely because they have the expectation that drivers should pay attention and watch where they are going instead of needing to have big brother idiotproof every foot of infrastructure for them. It’s still a shame that we as a society feel that we all need to be herded about and protected like gape-mouthed children simply because it’s easier to blame someone else for not taking care of us than to take responsibility for our own actions.
Times change. Government grasps tighten and relax. People took more responsibility when they screwed up. You could probably find many examples throughout U.S. history where the legal system relied precisely on your argument, Scott, but in THIS day and age of individual selfishness, irresponsibility and “screw you buddy, I got mine”, this is where we are.
Tom Lagatta needs to get his facts straight.
and why are complaining about 25 bucks? won’t kill you. I can think of plenty of other things I’d complain about before the 25 bucks being used for something good.
I drive that section of Broadway several times a week, and I have never had the slightest problem merging, even in heavy traffic. But then, I don’t drive drunk and I do notice and heed the many signs warning me to merge left, so I don’t go plowing straight through, as Rumsey did. All the additional pavement in the world wouldn’t have made any difference: She plowed blindly straight ahead.
If that stretch of road is so unsafe, why aren’t people dying all the time? That should have been the question used to decide the City’s fault in this matter, IMHO…
this is a crime that proson can’t fix. and pnly time will heal the lossm but the rumsey children are paying a undo lost of a momm who did make the wrong decision and would give her lofe to change the vents of that tragick night. 14 yrs is just to long. there ARE TO MANY VICTIMS HERE TO MAKE ANYONE WHOLE AGIAN. i ask that we all say a preyer for all involdedm and know glenda is not a bad person..
She’s as bad as they come (“I’ve just downed 10 beers. Let’s go for a spin!”), and would have kept driving if witnesses hadn’t followed her and dragged her back to the scene.
At least she’s finally off the road. Sheeze – there was evidence before her trial that she was still drinking and driving even after killing a child and they *still* wouldn’t take her damn license away.
Rumsey didn’t make “a” wrong decision – she kept making the same wrong decision over and over with every “one more chance” she was given, until she killed somebody, and continued even then.
If prison is what it takes to finally get her off the road and sober, it’s what it takes. If the system and yes, her friends and family had intervened to get her off the road before she killed somebody, her kids’ mom wouldn’t be in prison and the world would be a better place overall. Keep that in mind if you know *anybody* that drinks and drives, even occasionally, who through blind luck hasn’t killed somebody yet.
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About Me
I am an attorney who represents bicyclists who have been injured in
accidents, cited with traffic infractions or criminal charges, or assaulted by
motorists. Contact me at (520) 622-3333 or at ryberg@seanet.com. My physical
address is 312 South Convent Avenue Tucson, AZ 85701. Consultations are always
free. Please do not hesitate to contact me. --Erik Ryberg
February 13th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
While the Rincon story was a horrible tragedy and I’m glad Rumsey was found at fault, this verdict amounts to a $25 tax on every person in the city of Tucson. Thanks, judge-and-jury, this is just what we need in the midst of an economic recession. I hope the city appeals the case, and this amount is reduced by an order of magnitude.
Calculation: The population of Tucson is 535,000, according to Wikipedia. ($40 million / 3) / 535,000 people = $25/person.
February 14th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Did the jury really mean to say that the city and the homicidally drunk Glenda Rumsey are equally liable?
Equally? Really? Was the jury constrained from delivering a less hamfisted apportionment? I don’t know, so I ask.
February 14th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
I have to agree. While my heart goes out to the family, it sure is a shame that they let some lawyer (sorry Erik, but this is the sort of nonsense that gives all lawyers a bad name) talk them into including a “defendant” that had no hand in this tragedy, just to deepen the pockets. How many millions of drivers a year are able to safely navigate that lane reduction? The lane reduction is not a surprise, all that’s needed is to not be drunk and to pay attention – something that we should hold all drivers fully accountable for no matter the conditions. Now, every taxpaying citizen in Tucson who is not a drunk driver is being wrongfully punished for the actions of one who is. This also opens the door for every drunk driver to wrongfully spread the blame around to try and take some of the heat off from where it truly belongs.
February 14th, 2010 at 6:10 pm
Another one who’s shocked that the city has the exact same liability as the drunk.
February 14th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
This amount will surely be appealed. I can’t imagine attorneys for the city or Glenda Rumsey letting this go.
But this amount will be a wake up call for the city. During a budget crisis is exactly the time to make sure that things don’t get cut that are very important to public safety, even if it is a neglected minority like cyclists.
I am a little surprised to find this much empathy with the city. I am so frustrated with streets that are made extremely dangerous by poor planning during construction and after. If contractors treated cars the same way they treated bicycles, people would be at city hall with torches.
I can’t say that I am that surprised. It doesn’t sound like an equal burden for Glenda Rumsey and the City. Glenda probably doesn’t have that kind of cash lying around and she is going to spend a long time in prison.
All of this sounds like trying to put the water back in the dam after it has burst. My heart goes out to the family. I can’t imagine what I would do or how I would feel if my teenager were killed while riding his bike.
February 15th, 2010 at 8:06 am
I’m always amused that someone who reads a newspaper article thinks that they know better than jurors who listened to an entire trial’s worth of evidence that was admitted by a judge according to the law. And, then they blame lawyers for an outcome they don’t agree with!
February 15th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Everyone seems to be focusing on the $13 mil being charged to the city, but maybe this will call attention to the fact that even though Tucson is a “bicycle-friendly city” there are still some dangerous streets. Fatalities and bicycle friendliness don’t really go together.
February 15th, 2010 at 9:54 am
How about someone who navigates that stretch of road on a regular basis and just doesn’t see a real problem there for non-drunk drivers? I can’t help but wonder if everyone who can say that was Voir-Dire’d out of the jury pool.
Some things judt don’t pass the smell test no matter what the paper chooses to report.
February 15th, 2010 at 9:58 am
And as to assigning equal blame to the city and the cyclist, it doesn’t really work that way. “Blame” in this case is cash awards. And you can only award as much cash as the entity has to take. Glenda Rumsey does not have $13 million in assets. But her insurance company may cover a portion of that. So whether it’s 13 million or 13 billion, it really doesn’t matter, you can realistically only go for whatever her liability will cover.
February 15th, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Seems the jury of peers awarded a “send a message” award to COT DOT…
Is that so bad?
February 16th, 2010 at 8:56 am
The liability should stop with the person who put the vehicle out there when it shouldn’t be out there. She wasn’t by law suppose to behind the wheel. Even if the person was sober and not distracted they would still need to control their vehicle by law. So it comes down to getting CASH. Tucson is easier to pursue.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:31 am
City engineers testified that they KNEW they had cut corners by not widening the road enough at the merge point where young Jose was killed. They also testified with ARROGANCE about how it really wasn’t that important, even AFTER a boy minding his own business was killed in the bike lane.
The Rincons didn’t ask for this $ amount. They wanted to bring attention to the issue to hopefully keep someone else from dying in the future. It was the CITIZEN JURY that awarded this amount to them after it heard testimony from your moronic government officials. The fact that the award is so large should tell you how absolutely disgusted the jurists were with the City’s arrogance and negligence in this case.
Want to be angry with someone? Be angry with the City of Tucson and it’s decision to treat a young boy’s death in such a cavalier manner.
February 17th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I sure would like to see a transcript of that trial. In every public account I’ve seen or heard of the incident so far, it’s been reported that the boys weren’t even in the bike lane, but rather well off the road on the shoulder – is that now not the case? If they truly weren’t on the road, then it doesn’t even matter what the road design is or how arrogant any city employee may or may not have been. We should keep the blame where it truly belongs – if Rumsey had been sober and attentive, she would’ve seen the clearly marked lane reduction as easily as everyone else does on a regular basis, and this wouldn’t have happened.
February 17th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
He was well-within the marked bicycle lane.
The City reduced the merge lane by five feet, disregarding the standard widths recognized by highway safety engineers for a lane merge of this kind. He was hit on the right front corner of the drunk’s car. The five feet expansion that City engineers ignored would have put the bike lane five feet wider to the right, might have placed him wider than front right corner of the car and might have saved his life.
Still, City engineers testified that they did nothing wrong. Hense, a thoroughly disgusted jury levied the largest punishment in Tucon’s history.
Your City government at work.
February 18th, 2010 at 10:21 am
Possibly, but it’s still far more accurate to say that if Rumsey hadn’t been drinking, that would have been far more likely to have saved his life than the futile effort of trying to anticipate and build around the potential swerving path of random drunk drivers. The city engineers weren’t at fault, so of course they would testify to that belief. If the jurors were disgusted by such then they were levying a judgment based on emotion and not logic.
February 18th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Scott, I think what happened here is the jurors felt that if the roadway had not been negligently designed, Rincon would still be alive, and the negligent design contributed to Rincon’s death in equal measure to Rumsey’s intoxication.
Rumsey was the bad actor in all of this — that’s why she is in prison — but assigning fault is a different matter. I am not saying my gut agrees with this award, but it is not completely irrational. The jurors were there and they heard the story, and we did not. All sides had an opportunity for voir dire.
I wish the City had designed the road according to safety specs and young Jose Rincon was still alive and Rumsey was not in prison and none of it had happened. As Rincon Sr. put it, so many lives were affected by this.
And that’s why we have safety standards on roadways. It is foreseeable that drunk drivers will be driving on them, and we make certain judgment calls about how drunk-driver-proof we want our roads to be. In this case, the City ignored those judgment calls and the jury thought it mattered.
EBR
February 18th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Perfectly said, Erik. Thanks.
February 18th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
It’s difficult to assess the reasonable
expectations associated with any of the
events that contributed to this tragedy;
although bad things could have happened,
individually, from any of them.
Rumsey hadn’t killed anyone before while
driving drunk (although we know drunk
drivers cause problems). Her life results
in a huge change.
Chuy’s may have never over-served anyone
before that resulted in a death, although
they should be keenly aware of the drinking-
driving effect. We hope their policies have
changed.
Faced with the argument that bad things can
happen anytime, parents are reluctant to set
after-dark curfews for young teens. We can
hope some parents are influenced to do so
from this incident.
But the city has likely never faced a death
before from shortchanging a temporary
construction design. There probably aren’t
any design guidelines for accommodating
drunk driving skills.
This award approaches setting the city up
for responsibility along the lines that alcohol
sellers face in some areas.
Changes in their procedures will still be
difficut to justify even from this incident.
Some changes may be put into affect; but, like
the Olive tunnel on campus, may fade out over
time.
It’s really up to enforcement to remove drunk
drivers from the road, rather than highway
departments duty to accommodate them.
The award is a jury knee-jerk reaction.
February 18th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
“This award approaches setting the city up for responsibility along the lines that alcohol sellers face in some areas.”
I’m sure that might even be what the jury was thinking, but far more likely to happen (because it is the cheaper and easier path) is that the city will become more litigation-leery, come to the inevitable realization that the existence of “official” bicycle infrastructure can be too easily construed by a jury as a de-facto admission of responsibility for safety from threats that are out of the city’s control, and do the predictable CYA of pulling infrastructure and possibly even prohibiting the operation of bicycles on some (or many) roads. There is already talk that the planned Cylovia is now an issue because the city can’t afford the risk, right up until this decision that wasn’t the case.
This is the inevitable result of the concept of idiotproofing – it only succeeds at promoting the popularity of the logically flawed idea that if someone screws up, it becomes less and less that someone’s fault; and more and more the fault of whatever inanimate object they misused to do the damage, and the manufacturer or supplier of that object for failing to accurately predict the true depth of human stupidity or the multitude of ways that object could be misused. One simply cannot build a road that is safe from drunk drivers – it’s easy to point fingers after the fact and say “you should’ve done this” but next week another drunk driver will find some more resourceful way to ignore the reasonable precautions already in place that have worked for years, and the process starts all over again with the public expecting the supplier of the roads* to shoulder more responsibility, and the drunk driver to shoulder less.
(*I.e. us. Let’s not forget here that no city employee will (or can) be held financially responsible for this bill – this is a judgment against you and I and everybody else who didn’t design or build the road, even though we posses no real power over said employees other than pressure on elected officials who in reality have no direct control over city employees either.)
February 18th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Scott, so why even have safety standards for roads at all? If your point is that drunk drivers will kill kids in bike lanes no matter how a road is designed, then why even expend the revenue to employ safety engineers to design roads at all?
Your argument would be more convincing if the road that the alcoholic Rumsey was driving that night actually met the accepted safety standards that engineers use to design roads in every state in this country. It didn’t. Not even close. The “reasonable precautions already in place that have worked for years” were NOT in place. The City was responsible for this. Drunk driver or not, the jury obviously felt that the City cut corners, and that, coupled with the insufferable arrogance of the testimony of City engineers, really pissed them off.
And with all due respect, saying that you and I should not be held financially responsible because we “didn’t design or build the road” is a cop out. In a democratic society, we are responsible, and sadly, change in public policy only happens when people feel the financial pinch (and punishment) for the decisions and behavior of our government employees. The jury had no problem sending this message. Neither do I.
February 18th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
That there is an arbitrary standard in place that the road didn’t meet (i.e. theoretical ideal) is different from the reasonable precautions that *were* in place that actually *have* worked for years as evidenced by the fact that pretty much everybody else, even Rumsey herself when she was sober, seems to have been able to see the signs and lane markings and safely navigate this lane reduction for as long as it has existed – otherwise known as reality. Lower the bar, lower the expectations on the drivers, and you only really lower the effort and the result to the detriment of us all.
I don’t take this position lightly, I’ve been hit by drunk drivers twice myself while riding a motorcycle – both times interestingly enough while waiting for a red light that the approaching driver behind me couldn’t be bothered to notice. In both cases the traffic light was not the biggest, brightest, and hardest to ignore that is available, and I probably could have made a successful case in either incident that the local authority was “cutting corners” by failing to install the best available. It certainly would’ve made a big difference in my life to do so, but it is my deeply held belief – derived from years of observation – that it is this depersonalization of responsibility that is the root cause of much of what we all dislike about society today. Just 50 years ago, the notion that a road feature that everyone in town has safely used for years is somehow responsible for the actions of a drunk that left the road there would’ve elicited scoff and derision from the average citizen. Today it’s commonly accepted that if you refuse to learn it’s the school system’s fault; that if you buy more stuff on borrowed money than you can afford to pay back it’s the bank’s fault; that if you get lung cancer after knowing since the ’40s that those “coffin nails” you’ve been sucking down will kill you, it’s the tobacco company’s fault; that if you can’t be bothered to control your eating it’s McDonald’s fault; etc. etc. ad nauseum – it’s OK to keep making worse and worse life-choices because there is always somebody else that can be blamed to duck responsibility and make ourselves feel better. A settlement like this might benefit in the short-term those people that may truly deserve compensation, it’s even possible that it might result in better temporary performance from the city – although as I said above it’s far more likely to trigger the unintended consequence of a backlash against bicyclists – but in the long-run it just keeps lowering the bar and promoting the idea that we’re not really responsible for our own actions – government/business/parents/teachers/insert-blame-target-here are; we increasingly get the resulting society that such an attitude breeds, and we somehow can’t figure out why everyone is becoming so greedy, selfish, irresponsible and generally uncivil.
I just find that sad. Frustrating and sad.
February 18th, 2010 at 7:13 pm
I agree with many of your points and share your frustration about passing the buck, and we can discuss for days of what a “safety” standard for sober drivers on the road is. But if there IS a road safety standard in place (which there is) and the City ignores it and a loss is suffered by a responsible, tax-paying family, shouldn’t SOMEONE be held responsible for ignoring that standard??
We have safety standards for a reason. Just because no one is killed on a bicycle for years and years at that particular merge doesn’t mean the road is safe. It could just mean that drivers have not been driving drunk and/or have been lucky for years and years. Jose Rincon Sr. said it himself…it was the “perfect storm” that night: greedy Chuy’s + drunk driver + crummy road design = tragic death.
The moral of the story is this: cover your ass. Do the right thing. Don’t cut corners. If you ignore safety standards, you do so at your own peril. If you sell food that isn’t really food, the same risk. Loan money to people who you know can’t pay it back, same. Make cigarettes, be ready. You may get away with it for years, but when the “perfect storm” hits and you then choose to trot out your arrogant engineers to downplay a boy’s death, you will be served.
In a way, those 12 jurors just happening to all be on the same jury for this trial was a perfect storm in and of itself.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
What more accurate safety standard can you set but that which has been tested and proven over time to work in the real world without problem for the vast majority of users? Anything needlessly more stringent that was likely devised by committee and delivered by decree is often just that – CYA set to the lowest common denominator. And that denominator just keeps getting lower and more common every time we endorse the idea that the collective is somehow responsible for the actions of the individual. At one time, the national 55mph speed limit was touted as a “safety standard” – the fact that it existed as a national standard and that the states were blackmailed into enforcing it as such does not mean that it was any safer or led to a reduction in highway deaths over the previously proven reality; in fact it turned out that the opposite was true. Once again, when you expect less of people – that’s exactly what you get. We keep proving that to ourselves over and over again, and when the concept always inevitably fails and we wind up worse off instead of better, we think it’s because we haven’t taken it far enough yet. So here we go once again.
February 18th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
“At one time, the national 55mph speed limit was touted as a “safety standard”
Actually, the “National Maximum Speed Law” was originally about energy conservation, not motorist safety, per se:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
This was in the context of an addicted nation flailing about with gasoline shortages and price increases. OMG!
It morphed into a states rights issue and was discarded.
February 18th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Scott,
Are you an engineer? Safety standards, including civil engineering safety standards, are evidence based. This means that the standards are very, very thoroughly researched and vetted. These engineers either chose (or were more likely pressured) to cut corners to reduce costs. Some states even have laws against building civil structures which do not meet safety standards. So it is absolutely true that the city was negligent by not building to the standards. That is the definition of negligence. The amount is high in my opinion, but it will be appealed. Hopefully it sends a message. It doesn’t matter what political affiliation a person is, we all must agree, no we must demand, that civil infrastructure be safe. And it’s not as if it is a difficult problem to accomplish, the standards exist.
February 18th, 2010 at 11:42 pm
You’re right. We really don’t need safety standards, or if we do, we should relax them. If a driver thinks he/she can successfully make it home without them, he/she should be allowed to try without the City being held responsible. So to test this, go ahead and drive home on the other side of the yellow line tomorrow. That whole “separate the flow of traffic for safety” is ridiculous anyway. We shouldn’t expect less from people who could probably do it.
I think it’s really easy to tout theory when your child hasn’t been murdered because civil servants felt than the established safety guidelines for designing a merging traffic lane didn’t apply to them. Sorry, but if I’m ever faced with even remotely the same scenario and the City of Tucson is negligent this way, I will SUE THE HELL out of the City of Tucson. It’s good to know that others ($40 million jury) feel the same way.
February 19th, 2010 at 10:34 am
JB, not even close to my point and you know it, which is a sure sign that you really have nothing of substance to support your opinion, such as showing that this lane reduction *hasn’t* proven trouble-free for the vast majority of users all this time. Like say, a list of police callouts to that location, a collection of dated weekly photos of different fresh tire-tracks cutting across that dirt corner, or a private surreptitiously placed traffic-cam counting up the percentage of drivers that “oops” that spot even when there is nobody there to see it. Seriously – it bothers me to see any attention or fault at all in this case focused away from the person who made a conscious decision to guzzle her way to three times the legal limit, fumble her way into her car and go careening down the road; it saddens me to witness the constant societal march away from personal responsibility towards collective blame; but it just appalls me that there are too many people who are seemingly unable to make the very real distinction between that which proves to be safe in real life and an arbitrary CYA requirement set by some bureaucratic agency.
If the city loses this appeal please let it be because it was proven to a thinking jury that this lane reduction is indeed dangerous in real life and not because they were too busy having their heart-strings tugged to even bother considering such trivialities as facts and logic.
And Red, I agree that the gas “crisis” was the motivation, but where I lived it was sold and tenaciously clung to as a safety measure. I have a fond memory from when it first passed of standing on the side of the road trying not to smile while receiving the standard-issue “blood on the highway” safety lecture from a trooper who stopped me for doing 57 in a 55 on a road which just two weeks before had been a 65.
February 19th, 2010 at 11:40 am
I’m sorry you are saddened, Scott.
Not sure why you can’t open up to the possibility that BOTH personal responsibility AND City negligence can play a role sometimes. Maybe not all the time, but some of the time, like in this case. It appears that this jury considers both to be a factor.
February 19th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Scott, your problem seems to be with the safety standards themselves, not the jury. I don’t know what the jury instructions were in this case, but they were likely something along the lines of: “Did the City follow safety standards? If not, did their failure to follow those standards contribute to the collision? By what percentage?”
The City is welcome not to follow engineering guidelines, but doing so opens them up to lawsuits, because those engineering guidelines are put together by teams of bureaucrats who have a lot of information at their disposal. It seems you believe that in this case the standards were too strict because prior to Rincon’s death the road was safe.
But that’s a line-drawing problem, not an absolute problem as you are characterizing it. You just want the line to be drawn a little further to the left or right. Surely you do believe in some degree of safety standards? And that there should be some liability for not following them?
(Maybe you don’t. There are countries in the world that have no tort liability system, where you are always responsible for your own injuries and there is no or little bureaucratic oversight of things like highway design. But I suspect you wouldn’t want to live in those places.)
–EBR
February 19th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
Yes, it’s a very fuzzy line….
It was far more reasonable for
the city to expect no problems
from the road conditions there
than for Chuy’s or Rumsey to
expect there would be no pro-
blems from their action. In
holding the road equally
accountable, the jury does not
allow for exercise of the user’s
judgement. They’re not all equally
accountable. Aren’t we expected to
use our judgement for existing
conditions? This jury says no.
The government must have it all
perfect for us so we don’t have
to pay attention. This award is
not about safety and the longer this
thread goes, the easier that is to
see. To carry it all the way would
require that the city be sued for
every section of road that doesn’t
come up to the the almighty safety
standards. You wanna go there?
February 19th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
This is why I mentioned wanting to read the transcript. The city has been proclaimed to be as equally negligent as an extremely drunk driver, yet to all appearances actual negligence on the city’s part remains unproven. All that’s been established is that this lane reduction was constructed differently than an arbitrary standard that is held up as the norm for such features. This is not anywhere near the same as “is it safe?” or “were they negligent?” As I alluded to above, it would be incredibly easy and inexpensive for a good lawyer to show documentation that the reduction is actually unsafe. Imagine how dramatic and damning it would be to be able to show video or stills of multiple cars nearly blowing the change while cutting through the empty bike lane – especially following the engineer’s testimony. Doesn’t seem like a trick that a successful personal injury guy who’s goal is to maximize jury empathy would miss, so the fact that he pursued the far less visceral “standards” route instead most likely means that he *did* look into it and came up with nothing shocking to show – i.e. he discovered that the reduction *isn’t* inherently unsafe.
It is highly possible that I’m all wet here – all I can know for certain about that reduction is that I personally have witnessed and experienced no problems there in all the years I’ve been using that road on bicycle or motorcycle. Nor have I heard anyone else ever complain about any safety issue there until a drunk driver caused a tragedy and then tried to use the road design as an excuse. If I’m wrong about that all that needs to be done is to at least show some sort of actual proof that the reduction is not safe. I’d still believe that this contributes to the erosion of personal accountability of the drunk driver, but at least then you’d have a leg to stand on as to whether the city holds any actual liability or if this bridge was constructed simply to deepen the pot.
February 19th, 2010 at 4:05 pm
In that case your problem is with our system of law. In American tort law there is something called “negligence per se,” which basically says that in many cases if you don’t meet a legal standard, your behavior is presumed to be negligent (the degree has to be determined by a jury of course). I don’t know if in this case the City’s failure to follow the standard was determined to be negligence per se or not, but I suspect it was.
Negligence per se says for example if you were going 25 mph in a school zone and you injure someone there, you are a priori negligent and we don’t have to spend a lot of time at trial proving that going 25 in a school zone is dangerous. It just is, by law, because that determination has already been made.
Maybe you and everyone you know has driven 25mph in school zones every day of your life and never hit anybody, but it won’t persuade a court that the behavior is reasonable.
So you are only correct that their negligence was “unproven” in the sense that they didn’t have to prove something that you think they should have had to prove. You’ll have to take that up with 100+ years of American jurisprudence. (A few more Allitos and Thomases on the Supreme Court might do that for you.)
Also, you keep calling this an “arbitrary” standard, but it wasn’t arbitrary as in “made up” by the jury. It was a published design standard that road builders are supposed to adhere to, but in this case did not.
–EBR
February 19th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Oh, I see now – they don’t have to actually *be* negligent or do anything that’s real-world unsafe as long as they merely fail to CYA so as to leave an opening that allows them to be *portrayed* as negligent.
Yeah, that convinces me that this wasn’t just pocket-deepening. That stuff I said earlier about the depersonalization of responsibility being the downfall of civil society? I take it all back – my eyes have been opened.
February 19th, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Another example of negligence per se is of course driving drunk. A victim of a drunk driver doesn’t have to prove that *this particular driver* is impaired when drunk, even if that driver can get up and testify — even if they can *prove* — that they drive drunk all the time and never hit anything.
Negligence per se saves plaintiffs from having to present endless proofs of every element.
February 19th, 2010 at 7:12 pm
Oh Scott, why so sarcastic? And defensive?
FYI from your earlier post:
“…it would be incredibly easy and inexpensive for a good lawyer to show documentation that the reduction is actually unsafe. Imagine how dramatic and damning it would be to be able to show video or stills of multiple cars nearly blowing the change while cutting through the empty bike lane – especially following the engineer’s testimony. Doesn’t seem like a trick that a successful personal injury guy who’s goal is to maximize jury empathy would miss, so the fact that he pursued the far less visceral “standards” route instead most likely means that he *did* look into it and came up with nothing shocking to show – i.e. he discovered that the reduction *isn’t* inherently unsafe.”
This is EXACTLY what happened in Rumsey’s criminal trial (which I witnessed from the courtroom gallery). Pics and video footage were presented by Rumsey’s attorney to try and show that the merge wasn’t safe. I am not a lawyer, but I remember thinking to myself, “He’s opening the door to other contributing factors for the accident now.” Turned out to be true and this other contributing evidence was used in the civil trial. Then when the the City engineer who approved the design was called to the stand to testify, he came off like a defensive ass. Probably the same guy was called for the civil trial. It appears from the verdict that the City of Tucson didn’t even ask him to tone down his arrogance for the civil trial, and it cost them $40 mil. What a bunch of boobs.
This doesn’t mean Rumsey wasn’t guilty, just that the City didn’t do it’s job either.
“Oh, I see now – they don’t have to actually *be* negligent or do anything that’s real-world unsafe as long as they merely fail to CYA so as to leave an opening that allows them to be *portrayed* as negligent.”
That’s right, Scott. As a civilized society, we shouldn’t have to experience a tragic death or a near miss at a lane merge before understanding if it’s safe or not. Safety standards are developed based on years and years of other tragic deaths to hopefully PREVENT future deaths. That’s what an intelligent society tries to do…learn from previous mistakes.
Of course, if you know of another potentially dangerous driving hazard that the City chose to cut corners to design, you could always “real world” test it by putting your child on a bicycle there to see what happens. No? Didn’t think so…
February 19th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
What about the road hazards that we
negotiate on a daily basis? If a drunk
driver forces a cyclist onto the
trolley tracks in avoidance and they
fall and die, what kind of negligence,
if any, is that. Has the city
acknowledged tracks are unsafe by
means of signage. Are tracks acceptably
unsafe? If something is demonstratively
unsafe to a percentage of road users,
is the city liable if they go ahead and
install more?
February 20th, 2010 at 8:58 am
Ok then, as I also said above…
“If I’m wrong about that all that needs to be done is to at least show some sort of actual proof that the reduction is not safe. I’d still believe that this contributes to the erosion of personal accountability of the drunk driver, but at least then you’d have a leg to stand on as to whether the city holds any actual liability or if this bridge was constructed simply to deepen the pot.”
So you have a leg. This is why I said I wanted to see the transcript. Of course this would apply only if the jury for the civil trial was allowed access to this evidence, because if what Erik said is true – if a jury is indeed not allowed to consider the actual safety of the feature in question, but are only there to rubberstamp whether they heard it presented into evidence that said feature didn’t meet a standard, again without being allowed even to consider the applicability of that standard, I have a hard time understanding why we continue to maintain the pretense of a jury system at all.
Either way I’m still not convinced that the city is equally liable as an extreme DUI merely because they have the expectation that drivers should pay attention and watch where they are going instead of needing to have big brother idiotproof every foot of infrastructure for them. It’s still a shame that we as a society feel that we all need to be herded about and protected like gape-mouthed children simply because it’s easier to blame someone else for not taking care of us than to take responsibility for our own actions.
February 20th, 2010 at 10:49 am
It’s not likely, Scott, that you
would have been selected for this
jury.
February 20th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Times change. Government grasps tighten and relax. People took more responsibility when they screwed up. You could probably find many examples throughout U.S. history where the legal system relied precisely on your argument, Scott, but in THIS day and age of individual selfishness, irresponsibility and “screw you buddy, I got mine”, this is where we are.
Thanks for your viewpoint~
February 24th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Tom Lagatta needs to get his facts straight.
and why are complaining about 25 bucks? won’t kill you. I can think of plenty of other things I’d complain about before the 25 bucks being used for something good.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
I drive that section of Broadway several times a week, and I have never had the slightest problem merging, even in heavy traffic. But then, I don’t drive drunk and I do notice and heed the many signs warning me to merge left, so I don’t go plowing straight through, as Rumsey did. All the additional pavement in the world wouldn’t have made any difference: She plowed blindly straight ahead.
March 12th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
If that stretch of road is so unsafe, why aren’t people dying all the time? That should have been the question used to decide the City’s fault in this matter, IMHO…
April 6th, 2010 at 10:34 pm
this is a crime that proson can’t fix. and pnly time will heal the lossm but the rumsey children are paying a undo lost of a momm who did make the wrong decision and would give her lofe to change the vents of that tragick night. 14 yrs is just to long. there ARE TO MANY VICTIMS HERE TO MAKE ANYONE WHOLE AGIAN. i ask that we all say a preyer for all involdedm and know glenda is not a bad person..
April 7th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
She’s as bad as they come (“I’ve just downed 10 beers. Let’s go for a spin!”), and would have kept driving if witnesses hadn’t followed her and dragged her back to the scene.
April 8th, 2010 at 7:15 am
At least she’s finally off the road. Sheeze – there was evidence before her trial that she was still drinking and driving even after killing a child and they *still* wouldn’t take her damn license away.
Rumsey didn’t make “a” wrong decision – she kept making the same wrong decision over and over with every “one more chance” she was given, until she killed somebody, and continued even then.
If prison is what it takes to finally get her off the road and sober, it’s what it takes. If the system and yes, her friends and family had intervened to get her off the road before she killed somebody, her kids’ mom wouldn’t be in prison and the world would be a better place overall. Keep that in mind if you know *anybody* that drinks and drives, even occasionally, who through blind luck hasn’t killed somebody yet.