One of the most fundamental concepts of liability is that the defendant “takes the victim as he finds him.” Apart from hospitals and nursing homes, few areas of modern life confront, litigate and test this principle as often as public transportation.
Taking the victim as one finds him is unusual, as a legal construct, in that it can cut both ways – and often does:
Incentives are particularly important to consider when facing an enlightened plaintiff's attorney. Enlightened is not synonymous with intelligent or skilled. Smart or mediocre, and highly or marginally skilled, an enlightened attorney is likely to understand an unfortunate but cardinal principle of forensic science: While brains, skill, facts and evidence are important, the most important determinant of outcome, by far, is effort. This is true not only in a trial, but even more so in the labyrinth of negotiations which often lead up to it. With greater potential rewards, an enlightened attorney is likely to make more effort – including making a greater investment in forensic consultants and experts.
Not surprisingly, jurors tend to view these issues differently than do the victims. To an unfamiliar jurist, a wheelchair occupant who survives even a serious injury may appear little worse off after than before it. After all, the victim was already in a wheelchair. This is hardly the way disabled individuals perceive things – and hardly the way most forensic experts are likely to express them. To someone disabled, the difference between reliance on a manual wheelchair versus an electric one is more akin to a caste system. To both sets of individuals, this distinction is far more important than the difference between rich or poor, and easily transcend factors like age, sex, race or religion. Several years ago, a handful of severely-disabled special education students beat up the less-disabled bullies on their schoolbus. Whether disabilities are physical, psychological or developmental, those who possess them are conscious of, if not oversensitive to, their relative statuses with respect to them. When appropriate and helpful, a skilled attorney will find some way to convey such distinctions.
Even when not disabled, a passenger's physical condition or characteristics can affect his or her likelihood of experiencing certain types of incidents. A salient example involves slips-and-falls: The prototypical passenger falling on a moving vehicle, or falling while boarding or alighting from a stationary one, is overweight, if not obese. But this correlation hardly helps the defendant: Not only do such individuals enjoy the same rights to the same standards, but they constitute a disproportionately large percentage of public transportation riders. (This is true largely because health correlates with poverty, and poverty correlates with the use of public transportation.) Regardless, the victims' carriers can hardly claim that many things these individuals cannot do well are not reasonably foreseeable. To the consternation (and perhaps distain) of many defense attorneys, falling down does not automatically equate with contributory negligence. Yet I am continually surprised how many defendants' attorneys base their defenses on it.
Transportation providers face an odd conundrum with respect to vulnerable passengers. As “common carriers” – a status defined essentially by transporting members of the general public and charging fares – public transportation providers are held to the highest standard or duty of care whether carrying World Class athletes, acrobats or stunt men. As a practical matter, however, most jurors hold these providers to higher standards when vulnerable passengers are involved – even if this practice is not incorporated into statutes or jury instructions.
It also does not help motorcoach defendants that, as an industry-wide average, 60 percent of their passengers are elderly, and another 30 percent are schoolchildren (largely taking field or activity trips). With such a ridership profile, the “reasonably foreseeable” things that a motorcoach passenger might do or not do related to his or her disabilities or conditions might include practically anything. Vulnerable passengers are not merely frequent or even common. They form the bulk of the ridership at large. Thus, not only are motorcoach riders not professional drivers, most of them are not even normal passengers. Consequently, the observations which the professional driver of a common carrier will be expected to make, as a liability matter, will not likely operate as standards for his or her common passengers.
The lesson here should be obvious: If you need to exercise the utmost care handling a stone, do not dare drop an egg. Higher than highest? Such a condition or characterization may not exist in science, engineering, mathematics or logic. But do not bet against it in the courtroom.