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New York Judge Rules 6-Year-Old Can Be Sued
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."
The law (which he probably didn't write) says that accountability starts at four years old. The child was four.
What else was the judge supposed to do?
It's very simple: there's one set of rules for the peasants and another set of rules for the aristocracy.
Guess which group you fall into?
First, this was a trial court ruling by a judge, not a justice. This did not create or modify precedent for other courts. In New York, unlike the rest of the US, the low-level trial courts are called Supreme Courts. What the rest of us would think of as "The Supreme Court" is called the Court of Appeals. Yes, it's very confusing.
Second, this was a ruling on a motion to dismiss, not a ruling on the merits. This only says the child may be sued, not that the child is liable, nor even that the child (as opposed to the parents) would be made to pay anything. The parents are being sued as well; this is not some spiteful attack on the child in particular.
Third, this is not surprising in the least from a legal perspective and relies upon well-settled legal principles. In general the law in the US does not recognize an absolute age limit to liability. For negligence, children are judged according to the standard of a reasonable child of that age (unless they are undertaking an adult activity such as driving a car). For a four year old, that's not saying much.
Fourth, there's nothing uniquely American about this. Several European countries have similar or even harsher rules. In France, for example, children are judged according to the same negligence standard as adults, which is much stricter than the US rule.
"legal murder" is a mistatement of terms. Murder is premeditated illegal killing. Self-defense is usually not premeditated, and it's not illegal. I think the technical term for killing is homicide, and that doesn't assign guilt or assume planning. There are adjectives to describe the cause of the homicide.
Is that really the world you want to live in? Where parents keep their children on a 12 inch leash and act as a force field protecting their children from the universe, and the universe from their children? Because that produces kids who are by definition unresponsible, and by training co-dependent.
By the way, the mom was supervising the child. A fact that nobody had disputed until you.
This is a pretty standard ruling under American Tort law. In civil negligence cases, the standard for negligent acts performed by children is whether a reasonable child of the defendant's age, intelligence, and experiences would have exercised reasonable care in this situation. (This is, of course, more generous a standard than is applied to adults, where the standard is whether a reasonable person would have exercised reasonable care. This is to say that, for the child, the test is more subjective and is geared specifically to the intelligence and experience of the child in question.)
As to the point of all of this, the deceased woman's estate can make a civil negligence claim against the child for medical expenses (which may be quite high - I haven't the first idea as I'm not a doctor), lost income/life expectancy (which in this case will be very low), and funeral costs. The one thorny legal issue that will likely come up in this case is whether the death was proximately caused by the bike crash. If there were some intervening cause of the death, say if the deceased caught an infection while in the hospital and the infection killed her, that might reduce the defendant's liability. (On the other hand, it might not. It will depend on the facts of the case. I'm just highlighting legal issues here.) Other potential claims will depend on the facts of the case. If, for example, the deceased was walking with her family when the child on the bicycle struck her, those family members might have claims in their own right for physical or emotional harms they suffered.
Lastly, the issue of who will actually pay is very simple. This child is not going to pay herself. This child is not going to jail. Standard homeowner's insurance includes a general liability policy which covers damages in civil lawsuits. The fact that the suit was even brought in the first place indicates that the defendant's family almost certainly has such a policy because it would make no economic sense to sue absent them having one. (In civil suits, insurance money is very easy to get. As a plaintiff, you really don't want to have to deal with getting liens on property, garnishing wages or seizing bank accounts. One can do it, to be sure, but then you have to get into other considerations of what the state law will allow you to take, and you actually have to get your hands on the property/money to seize it. Often, if their isn't a ready supply of insurance money to go after, plaintiffs will elect not to sue.)
By the way, this is not news. This is a sad story that got picked up by some media outlet because most members of the media (to say nothing of most people in the United States) don't understand the common law of negligence that is applied in state courts.
Actually when I was 5 years old I was allowed to play outside unsupervised, as long as I didn't cross any major streets and came back if my parents blew the whistle that they used for the purpose.
They don't have the part of the brain that you would use to make such a decision.
Whoa, no way.
Maybe you're referring to how the prefrontal cortex, region of executive control, is underdeveloped? And anyway, that just means that they have a hard time controlling themselves, not that they can't plan or perform evil.
No, actually they really "can't plan" at that age :) Proper planning needs (beyond impulse control) a) a proper sense of time (usually developed at around 6 years) and b) proper reasoning (mostly developed at about 12-13, but isn't finished until the "kid" is about 18). And I would argue that doing evil needs a proper grasp of the concept of death, which usually develops at around 9.
For sources see the works of Piaget on developmental psychology.
No, wait. Someone set us right further down - the NY "Supreme Court" is misleadingly named; there's actually several NY supreme courts, which are first-line trial courts in that state. So this is just a low-level judge who made a wacky decision.
The top court in NY is the Court of Appeals.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Just curious... Are you referring to this incident that occurred in Jackson, Ohio? In that case, there were no fatalities. Just some minor pellet wounds for the babysitter and a bystander.
As for the child, he definitely showed that he had fairly advanced fine motor skills and was able to display excellent memory recall (either through learning by repetition or by watching adults). However, he wasn't able to distinguish between a real firearm and a toy gun, and probably didn't appreciate the difference (or consequences). He also didn't exhibit much planning ability. The whole thing was pretty spur-of-the-moment.
This is fairly normal development for kids in the four-year old range. It's right at that transitory area between two of Piaget's stages: pre-operational vs. concrete operations. At that age, kids are already physically able to do some fairly complex things, but are only beginning to understand the consequences of negative actions and concepts. I think most people have noticed that this is around the age when kids begin to actively lie, bully, cheat, etc. So, it's hard to say what his motive was, other than to express his disapproval with the babysitter.
(Note: I'm trying not to talk out of my ass. The above was written after consulting my spousal unit; she has an MA in clinical child psychology and works with developmentally-challenged kids.)
By the way, I'm not sure that I believe the incident went down exactly as reported. According to articles that I read on other news sites, there was a fairly large group of kids in the mobile home, ranging from infants up to late-teens. The alternative theory is that the teens were goofing around with the shotgun when it accidentally went off, then laying the blame on the four-year old.