Four-year-old sued for bike accident
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
If children that are 4 years old can be 'negligent' then we had better lock all of them up because children are - literally - without brakes and will get up to stupid stuff.
If you, as a 87 year old are so fragile that you can not partake in normal street traffic without the risk of injury because you can no longer escape from a four year old or sustain the impact of a small kid on a bike then you have a problem anyway. All it would take is one out of control dog that is happy to see you or a shopping cart rolling in to you and the results would be much the same.
So, do we really want to live in a world where everybody sues everybody else and the term 'accident' no longer has any meaning?
If there are no playgrounds where they can play safely kids will ride their bikes on the sidewalk, and 87 year olds had better watch out when they do. Presumably given their age they are the wiser party.
I'm really sorry the lady died, but remember the kids never intended to hurt her, break her hip or mean to kill her, that's what it being an accident is all about.
Idiot judges bug me, idiot supreme court judges bug me even more.
Of course, the article doesn't say that she died of injures resulting from the accident, maybe something unrelated happened.
The ruling by the judge, Justice Paul Wooten of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, did not find that the girl was liable, but merely permitted a lawsuit brought against her, another boy and their parents to move forward. (I apologize for not providing the actual names, they're on the article)
However, this paragraph from the decision itself is somewhat curious to me:
"A parent’s presence alone does not give a reasonable child carte blanche to engage in risky behavior such as running across a street” A reasonably prudent child, whom we may presume has been told repeatedly by the age of four to look both ways before crossing a street‘, knows that running across a street is dangerous even if there is a parent nearby. Despite this, if a parent or other trusted adult actively directs a four year old child to cross a street at a ceoain time, the only logical inference is that the child will reasonably believe it is safe to cross the street at that time."
It seems to imply that if I am driving down the street, and a 5 year old runs in front of me and I run him/her over, he can be accused as negligent. He should know he has to look both ways? He has presumably been told so many times that he has completely understood the underlying risks? This doesn't seem rational to me; one of the first things I heard related to driving was that behind every bouncing ball there's a child running for it. Hell, I've been that child a few times! Can children of age 5 actually be reasonably prudent?
I'm not saying that there's not a crime here, or that I'm an expert in kids or anything like that. I don't even have kids. But reading that decision rendered me literally speechless for a while.
I said there:
There's never such a thing as a coincidence, everything that happens is ordained and brought about by mystic forces.
There's never such a thing as an accident, someone always needs to be at fault and punished.
Some people tut, sigh, and shake their heads, but it seems inevitable that people will try to assign blame and receive reparations for what in earlier times would have been called accidents. Insurance companies get away with clauses about "Force Majeure," but they have money to make sure the law-makers listen to them.
Um, such as being four years old?
I got out, looked at the back of my car, saw it was only a scratch and told him not to worry about it. He looked utterly stunned that I would not take advantage of him and call my ambulance chasing lawyer for the pain in my neck that suddenly developed.