Something is badly wrong with our culture as well as our courts if terrorists can be found less culpable for their acts of terrorism than the owners of the buildings that were terrorized.
The buildings, in this case, are quite familiar — famous for no longer existing. They were known as the World Trade Center. Eight years before 9/11, terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the WTC garage, killing six and injuring hundreds.
On Wednesday, a New York state appeals court upheld a jury verdict that, for purposes of pending lawsuits for monetary damages, allocated 68 percent of the blame for the bombings on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Read that again. The Port Authority, which owned WTC, was held more than twice as responsible for the bombings as the bombers themselves. Next headlines: Up is down, black is white, and Hades is a cooler place than heaven. This case shows out-of-control litigation can reach beyond grasping plaintiffs lawyers to the judges on the bench.
Oh, sure, all of the legal niceties were observed. The jury weighed the evidence in a careful, step-by-step fashion. It noted several explicit warnings provided to the Port Authority by sources as credible as Scotland Yard that just such a bombing, carried out in precisely such a fashion, was possible.
And the appeals court reviewing the case cited ample precedent — albeit with at least one rather strained extrapolation — for its conclusion that owner’s negligence can be at least 50 percent to blame for harm even when the harm was caused by another party’s deliberate, “particularly heinous” actions.
But the appeals court went off the rails entirely when it moved from law to interpretation.
Just because the Port Authority was warned but took inadequate precautions, the court ruled, “the intentional act” of the terrorists “causally did little more than bring the incipient catastrophic potential of the negligence to terrible fruition.”
Moreover, it wrote, “defendant’s negligence had been extraordinarily conducive of the terrorists’ conduct — so much so that the fulfilment [sic] of the terrorists’ plot and the ensuing harm could with clear justification have been understood as primarily attributable to that negligence.”
In other words, by not protecting against murder, the Port Authority was “primarily” responsible for causing murder. The murderers, though, just did what any old murderers would do, indeed what they by an inexorable force of nature could not help but do once made aware of the opportunity. That’s why the murderers were less than one-third responsible for the harm!
Excuse the bluntness, but that’s just nuts.
Imagine if you live in a city where the murder rate is rising and your neighbors warn you to lock your doors. But you grew up in a time and culture where nobody locked doors — and you felt caged, imprisoned, if you had to live in so much fear that you felt door-locking was necessary.
Then, one day, while a guest is in your house, some thug walks in and murders your guest. Are you more “responsible” for your guest’s death than is the murderous thug who did the deed? Of course not.
A rule of statutory construction exists in virtually every jurisdiction of American law, including in New York, that was stated specifically in the case of Long v. State of New York (2006): “It is well settled that courts should construe [a statute] to avoid objectionable, unreasonable, or absurd consequences.” Surely, that rule ought to apply in this case. Negligence of course ought to be punishable to a certain degree. But negligence is not a cause; it is a mere mistake.
There’s also a broader societal question here. How, pray tell, did a jury of presumably reasonable New Yorkers reach such a silly decision? Arguably, this is one more example of the theoretical tommyrot holding that individuals are more products of their cultures than they are responsible for their own actions.
The corollary to those assumptions is that if anything bad happens, then SOMEbody with deep pockets ought to pay restitution, no matter who actually took deliberate action to cause the harm.
These attitudes make a mockery of all principles of individual accountability upon which the whole of the American constitutional system and its British common law roots are based.
The blame-shifting erodes the very fabric of our society. If we’re all potentially responsible for somebody else’s evil acts, then nobody is conclusively responsible for his own. That way lies anarchy, and utter horror.
