New York Judge Rules 6-Year-Old Can Be Sued 799
suraj.sun sends this snippet from Reuters:
"A girl can be sued over accusations she ran over an elderly woman with her training bicycle when she was 4 years old, a New York Supreme Court justice has ruled. The ruling by King's County Supreme Court Justice Paul Wooten stems from an incident in April 2009 when Juliet Breitman and Jacob Kohn, both aged four, struck an 87-year-old pedestrian, Claire Menagh, with their training bikes. Menagh underwent surgery for a fractured hip and died three months later. In a ruling made public late Thursday, the judge dismissed arguments by Breitman's lawyer that the case should be dismissed because of her young age. He ruled that she is old enough to be sued and the case can proceed."
What happened to accidents? (Score:3, Interesting)
What happened to accidents? It seems that everything in life needs to be controlled, somebody is accountable. There is no space for accidents, so somebody got to hang, that's when it comes to small girls. But when you talk about serious crimes like foreclosure fraud and the wall street fraud then they don't press charges because 'they might find the culprit'.
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
I live in Europe where (almost) everybody has insurance (civil resposibility) against such things, but only if the parents admit having done something wrong during the supervision of their kids.
If they did everything right and the kid does damages, the victim has to sue the kid.
Since most kids don't have any income, you may have to wait a long time to get your money.
Re:What is the point? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mommy, I'm Bankwupt! (Score:3, Interesting)
"Here's my cwayons, my huggy bear, my Dora The Explorer backpack, my woller skates, and my puppie, Snookie. Datz all I have, Mam."
Re:What is the point? (Score:1, Interesting)
I live in Europe where (almost) everybody has insurance (civil resposibility) against such things
Which part of Europe ? I live in Europe too and I don't have such an insurance.
Re:Wait what? (Score:0, Interesting)
If it causes someone to break their hip, then what's the fucking difference? I hope someone runs over your face with a tricycle.
4 is the new 30 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wait what? (Score:5, Interesting)
>Is this the problem with the lawyers, or is this a problem with the judge?
It might be a form of protest. The judge has just brought it to a national spotlight that the law allows (and maybe requires) him to permit a suit to go forward against a six year old for a liability incurred at age four.
The judge knows damn well it won't get past the first hearing, but instead of sweeping the real issue under the rug, he has made it so that it *cannot* be ignored.
I don't think this judge is insane or inhuman as he's been made out to be. I think this might have been a stroke of genius that will end up with the insane laws being changed.
Re:What is the point? (Score:5, Interesting)
If all life is equally valuable, then whoever will live the longest (statistically) with a transplant should win.
Re:Wait what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Recipe for idiotic commentary (Score:2, Interesting)
Post, without any guiding commentary, something of a legal and non-technical nature which Slashdot readers are ill-equipped to comment intelligently on, due to (1) their lack of relevant background knowledge, plus (2) the quixotic expectation that the same analytical skills which underlie their professional success in technical fields can simply be brought to bear on unrelated subjects, unmodified, and unsupplemented by any additional education on the subject, self-administered or otherwise, which might provide a foundation for a sensible thought on the subject.
Result: a bunch of geeks who are clueless about the law, and about the sensible practical judgments which are the foundation for just about any legal doctrine that doesn't appear to make sense to an outside observer, and many of whom are perpetually butthurt over information "not being free", make a bunch of uninformed and nonsensical comments about how lawyers and judges are crazy and stupid.
Re:Pardon my language and lack of depth, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
We Europeans tend to forget that the US is massive. It's twice the size of the entire EU, though only has 3/5 of the population. Population wise it's comparible to the Eurozone countries.
The major difference is that the culture seems to be based around 'city states' more than 'countries' as it is in the Eurozone..... your average Texan is as close to someone from New York as a Finn is to a Greek.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
My conjecture: The lawsuit against the child gives him a way to compel testimony from the doctor who treated the woman, and is a discovery vehicle for the woman's medical records.
They aren't going after the kid's assets. They are looking for an angle to go after the doctor who treated the woman, didn't do everything possible to save her life, and let her die.
All of the people commenting on this story are focusing on the kid, and the weirdness of suing a six year old. Very few seem to be thinking like a lawyer (not just incarnately evil, but also greedy.)
Dollars to donuts says a malpractice element enters into this story.
Re:competency (Score:2, Interesting)
>The judge is an idiot and not fit to sit the bench.
The judge is smart enough to realize that a lawsuit against the kid will open up the woman's medical records to the court, and will demand testimony from the doctor who treated her, and who presumably didn't do everything possible to save her life. She didn't bleed out on the street under the kid's bike. She died after months of (mis)treatment by a quack. I think that's an important element to this story that's being overlooked because of the sensational nature of the child being sued.
Re:Pardon my language and lack of depth, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Shit like what? A lady died. I don't think it's completely insane for the family of the victim to want to be heard in court. They lost a loved one. The kid and the parents just have to appear and account for their actions.
It was an accident. Accidents happen. If someone dies, that's awful, but it's still an accident. If you start to sue any child that somehow harmed someone else, parents would have to start leashing their kids as soon as they leave the house (and use a short leash). For some reason that's not the society I'd want to live in.
It makes for a disturbing headline, but logically I think it makes perfect sense.
If the goal of the legal system is to make as much money as possible out of it, then yes, it is a logical decision. Also, it's exactly what's wrong with the system.
"Peers" doesn't mean "peers". (Score:1, Interesting)
Imagine a hacker, whom the usual media circus has convinced the general public that this guy can launch nukes by whistling into a phone.
Chances are, Bob the Wal-Mart clerk would be on his jury. Now, I don't mean to denigrate Bob the Wal-Mart clerk, but Bob the Wal-Mart clerk, by dictionary definition, isn't the peer of Mr. Rhetorical Uberhacker.
Bob the Wal-Mart clerk, for example, showers daily and has social skills. He also can't get his microwave to display the correct time, and gets his news from 'clicking on that blue E'.
"A jury of one's peers" has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with legalese. Sad, but yes, some sixty year old retiree would be the peer of this poor girl.
Similar risks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
Me neither.
Re:Pardon my language and lack of depth, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
^ this a hundred times.
I have tons of trouble convincing my friends out of country that the US isn't the one portrayed on television and there are very, very, distinct differences in culture even only a few hundred miles apart. Some parts of the country actively HATE other parts and where it not for our central government would have nothing to do with each other.
I'm out in California after much time in the East and would completely love it if California where to leave the union. Those americans are crazy!
Re:What is the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
live in Europe where (almost) everybody has insurance (civil resposibility) against such things, but only if the parents admit having done something wrong during the supervision of their kids.
If they did everything right and the kid does damages, the victim has to sue the kid.
In Germany, children up to 7 years are in principle not capable of being guilty of anything. So you can't sue them. (Maybe you can sue them, but the case would be very simple: Child under seven, you've lost). In road traffic, children under 10 are never at fault. Parents will be responsible if they were negligent. So if they are insured, and the damaged party was a friend or relative, they will tend to claim to have been negligent (and insurance pays). If they are not insured, they will tend to claim they have not been negligent. And judges know that even properly supervised children are quite capable of causing damage, which then nobody will have to pay for.
So this case wouldn't have a chance in hell. For the woman who was injured and died, that would have been just bad luck. Like tripping over your own feet and hurting yourself.
Re:What is the point? (Score:1, Interesting)
The same judge is also reenacting the legal right ot have Debtors prison and Debt slavery.
Sounds like the judge needs to be disbarred and thrown into jail for the rest of his life, or at least burned at the stake by the public as a warning to the other judges. I prefer judges and other public service personnel to be publicly executed by the public for misdeeds.. Torches and Pitchforks are the answer to tyranny
Re:Wait what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think if I had a kid and this happened to him/her, when the judge found the 6-year-old competent to stand trial, I would have told my kid to tell the judge that he/she wanted to serve as his/her own attorney, just to fully paint the trial as the mockery that it is. There's clearly a line of reasonableness here, and this clearly crosses it. Yes, it's sad that the elderly lady died. It was also an accident caused by a child.
Further, I find it difficult to believe that a child of that age could have been so reckless (while on a bicycle with training wheels) and traveling at such a high speed that an adult should not have been able to look both ways and see the child coming far enough in advance to avoid getting hit. Therefore, I can't help but suspect that at least part of the fault is due to an absence of sufficient care by the elderly woman as well.
Either way, I hope this girl grows up to be politically powerful enough quickly enough to get this judge tossed out on his ass. I can't imagine this is what the elderly lady would have wanted, and her heirs should be ashamed of themselves.
Re:You left off part. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's true. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5651802 [go.com]
Re:Wait what? (Score:3, Interesting)
The kid was almost five. I've seen five year olds do, or attempt to do, some pretty destructive acts of mayhem *on purpose*.
No, you haven't. Not in the sense that you would do something 'on purpose'.
Actually, yes, on purpose. Ten miles from my house, a 4 year old got angry with a babysitter because the babysitter wouldn't let him/her do something. The toddler went to the closet, opened it, grabbed an unloaded SHOTGUN, picked up the shells and LOADED IT, then proceeded to walk over to the babysitter and shoot him to death.
Re:Wait what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except this can't be the first hearing. This was decided by a justice of the New York Supreme Court, so this must have gone though a lower court or two first. There are at most two higher courts in the USA - the Federal appeals courts (don't know about this one) and the US Supreme Court.
Re:Pardon my language and lack of depth, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
your average Texan is as close to someone from New York as a Finn is to a Greek
I'm going to assume you meant distance-wise. Europe, as the motherland of a certain segment of "white" (I can't think of a better word for it at the moment, sorry) civilization, was originally segmented into a rather large number of different cultures. Since mechanized travel didn't exist back then, and even animal-assisted travel could be sparse, a lot of those cultures tended to develop more-or-less independent of each other, and thus we have languages that - while they may bear some base relation - are radically different than each other.
Exempting natives, the US as a country is in many ways quite young compared to Europe. While there are some differences between states, the language is still roughly the same across such, and much of the culture and laws are shared. TV probably helps more for this than transportation, actually.
A comparison with a Texan VS a New-Yorker isn't really as fair as a Finn VS a Greek. There are huge language differences, and the common culture from which the current US was born is *MUCH* younger than that between Finland and Greece. Hence you have the Euro still being fairly recent (within my generation), while the US dollar - though varying in form - has been around quite a bit longer. The states - despite their distance - are still much more cohesive within their country than the countries of Europe are within their continent.
That isn't to say that all states are the same, far from it. You have radically different climate, subcultures (hell, you get different radically subcultures within a city), laws, and many other things, but there's still a lot of general cohesion that isn't quite there in Europe.
Cultural differences (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, but you can get a lot of that within a state or city too, especially a bigger city. You'll have an area that's predominantly white, black, Chinese, or whatever.
First, I'll state that I'm not an American, but rather I'm one of your northern Canadian neighbors. It's funny because I can definitely notice differences in upbringing and culture between Americans and Canadians, but I can also notice a lot of similarities, and I'll bet that the influence of American TV tends to increase those over time.
But hell, I can go to Vancouver (BC) or Toronto (Ontario), and see big cultural differences in a regional sense, and people nearly hate each other in those areas too. Try shopping in some areas of Richmond (Greater Vancouver Area, predominantly Chinese) and you'll be lucky to get any service if you're not Chinese or with a Chinese friend. Heck, a lot of provinces/cities have a hate-on for Toronto, and don't even get me *started* on Quebec.
But to compare that to Europe still seems a bit silly. At least for the most part I can go to a restaurant in North America and order a coffee/coke in English. Yeah, some people have funny accents that makes it a bit hard to understand, and there are areas that are culturally a bit non-english, but for the most-part there's still a lot of *sameness* too.
Re:What is the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. Same conclusion the organ transplant lists came to.