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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."
Previous rulings have held that there is a sliding scale of responsibility between 4 and, I believe, 12. At four a child is presumed to not be capable of fully understanding their actions so it is on the plaintiff to prove that this particular four year old did understand. A very tough task indeed. At 12, the burden is on the defense to prove that this particular child could not understand his/her actions.
The big decision in this case was that the parents cannot be sued. Now the plaintiff is going to have to prove that a four year old on her training wheeled bike, racing another child, was cognizant of the ramifications of her actions of riding on the sidewalk. Good luck with that.
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.