Once upon a time, a man
in Moscow
was down on his luck and attempted to commit suicide. He was in an argument with his wife when he
flung himself from the 9th story of his apartment building and
instead of landing on the asphalt, he landed on a 7 year old girl who happened
to be walking by the building at the time.
The girl was in the hospital for months and not surprisingly ran up a
bill that her parents felt was better paid by the tortfeasor. The courts agreed and awarded the girls the
cost of all her hospital bills. Moral of
the story: suicide
attempts that don’t end in suicide end in costly financial damages.
Although the
circumstances of the claim are unusual, the nature of the suit is not. In personal injury cases such as this it is
the same basic elemental identification: the defendant owed a duty to the
plaintiff, the defendant breached this duty to the plaintiff and was the cause
of the injuries, and the plaintiff suffered ascertainable damages as a result
of the accident.
Interestingly enough, a recent
study by the Wall Street Journal found that New York based personal-injury lawsuits claiming everything
from excessive force to false arrest to malicious prosecution by New York City
police have nearly doubled since 2001, and the median cost of resolving cases
has risen steadily. The article noted
that this type of litigation increases during troubled economic times and so
this may be a nationwide trend.
A recent study by LegalMatch
showed just how wide personal injury cases can range: Dog
bites, automobile accidents, products liability, slip and falls, medical
malpractice, and construction accidents.
Although the claims and the evidence required for these various personal
injury accidents can range, one thing that is consistent is the importance of
documenting everything from medical bills to identifying key witnesses to
taking photographs of your injuries and the accident scene.
Suicide is a tragedy and
usually leaves a lot of unanswered questions for the now deceased
individual. When the suicide attempt
fails, however, that individual is now available to answer for those questions,
questions that can take on a legal element.
It is hard for me to write that the man in Moscow should have been more
careful in falling from a building because safety was actually not on his mind; nonetheless there is no
question that he was completely at fault for the injuries the girl sustained
and the court was right in awarding her payment.
By: Violet Petran
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