Export thread

BBC News - New York child sued for woman's death after bike crash

Well, this is some fucked up shit. The kid was riding her bike in a negligent manner? Of course she was! She was four! Four-year-olds can't even walk far without stumbling or tripping over their own feet.

Four year olds can barely even spell bicycle, let alone be accountable for riding one.

What's the value in suing a small child, anyway? I get the monetary motivations in suing the parent, but why the child?

Maybe that old lady really wanted the kid's Hello Kitty! backpack.

That isn't new. Children have been sued before. The case will probably turn out in the childs favor anyway.

The old woman is suing for the child's soul.

Like it or not, they were on a public street, and are required to follow the rules of the road, just like any other cyclist or driver. They must yield to pedestrians.

If they were not old enough to follow the rules or capable of controlling their vehicles, their parents should not have allowed them to ride in the street.

Chances are good the person suing them wanted the police to treat it as a criminal matter, but after investigation they determined there was nothing to prosecute, so the next logical step is to sue the child. The sole object is to hurt the little girl and/or her family as much as possible.

Nothing good will come of it, but it's what angry, hurt, depressed people do when they have no other emotional support.

The BBC article is a bit incomplete. According to the NYTimes article, the children were cycling, with training wheels, on the sidewalk, not the street, which is explicitly allowed under NYC bike rules (and it may even be required for children under 13), and the poor woman's death is being reported as "unrelated" to the accident.

This doesn't decide things one way or the other in a civil suit, but more context is definitely needed. There are no reports anywhere of how fast they were actually going, after all. This sounds more like an unfortunate accident than anything else.

..the womans death happened three months later. What does this have to do with ANYTHING?

If something causes or in anyway attributes to a death then it is still actionable no matter how long it has been.

I think LittleSin is saying that there's no way the child's actions are directly connected if her death occurred 3 years later.

But they could be. There have been cases of violent assaults that caused death years later that were prosecutable. Im not sure about the statute of limitations on civil matters. It's a state by state thing.


also here is one of the cases i was thinking of

Garratt v. Dailey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

First Lady Puffinstuff said:

Like it or not, they were on a public street, and are required to follow the rules of the road, just like any other cyclist or driver. They must yield to pedestrians.

Click to expand...

This is why I fucking hate bicyclists on the road. They can't even maintain anything close to the speed limit on the road, causing traffic issues, and as far as a car driver is concerned they are pedestrians.

Also the fact that this is getting anywhere near a courtroom is why our civil courts are fucked up.

I'm reading the situation in a similar way to FLS - it sounds like the victim's family wanted to press for a criminal charge against the toddler, which is patently ridiculous. Children that small are not held criminally accountable for a reason: they honestly have no concept of the law as a law.

However, they SHOULD have a good knowledge of right and wrong. But in this case, not knowing all the particulars, it sounds as though they were just acting as kids do: racing bikes, laughing and having fun. The elderly lady being struck is regrettable, and doubtless avoidable, but to hold a TODDLER accountable due to NEGLIGENCE is nuts.

This is going to get tossed out on it's ass. I hope, at least.

As an aside, it helps to have makare's take on this... I have next to no grounding in civil case law, so it's nice to have a read from someone familiar with that side of the bar.