Deborah Chang
Brian J. Panish
What is the value of a poor man’s life? Focusing solely on noneconomic damages can maximize the wrongful-death verdict
“If money is all that a man makes, then he will be poor. Poor in happiness and poor in all that makes life worth living.” —Herbert Casson
On January 28, 2009, 48-year-old
Cameron Cuthbertson, a legally blind man, attempted to board a three-car train at Del Amo Station on the Blue Line in Compton. Mistaking the gap between the second and third cars as the doorway of a train car, he stepped off the platform and into the gap, falling onto the tracks below. While attempting to climb back onto the platform, his body was crushed and severed when the train began to move. At the time of his death, Cameron lived with his 73-year-old mother, Mary Cuthbertson. In the wrongful death case brought by
Mary Cuthbertson against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA”), we decided to pursue only noneconomic damages at trial. Economic damages were, not surprisingly, minimal because Cameron’s blindness limited his job opportunities and household services. Up to the time of his death, and despite his declining vision, Cameron washed cars in his Compton neighborhood for pocket money. The MTA undoubtedly placed much emphasis on the fact that his eco- nomic damages were minimal: no settle- ment offer was ever made. The jury returned a verdict in favor
of plaintiff, awarding $17 million in noneconomic damages ($5 million past and $12 million future). One month earlier, in Kern County,
a jury awarded our client a very high wrongful-death award against the City of Bakersfield, also based on noneconomic damages. Our strategy in both cases was
40 — The Advocate Magazine JANUARY 2012
based on the premise that jurors can bet- ter understand and appreciate noneco- nomic damages in wrongful-death cases when such damages are not combined with and diluted by minimal economic damages.
Economic damages in wrongful-death cases
Whenever death occurs unexpectedly
due to another’s negligence, the emo- tional loss of the decedent to his or her loved ones is unquantifiable. The tragic loss of a son, daughter, a parent, or a spouse leaves a void that can never be filled. Abraham Lincoln expressed this sentiment best in his letter to Mrs. Bixby in 1864 following the loss of her sons during the Civil War: I feel how weak and fruitless must be any
words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming.
Despite these facts, we nevertheless
ask jurors to do the unimaginable: to quantify the loss of a decedent to another. To perform this daunting task, we arm them with evidence and broad jury instructions relating to economic and noneconomic damages. Too often, however, trial lawyers focus too much time and effort in gathering and pre- senting evidence of those aspects of the decedent’s loss that are quantifiable: the economic damages. We retain econo- mists to calculate how much the dece- dent would have made in his lifetime and to determine the reasonable value of household services that the decedent would have provided. We gather receipts for funeral and burial expens- es, and work diligently on trying to plump up those economic damages as much as possible. There is a harsh reality, however,
related to these economic damages. Unless the decedent is someone like Steve Jobs, those economic damages will never be enough to drive the wrongful- death damages award to where they should be. The true value of a man’s life to his loved ones cannot be measured by how much he earned. In fact, those eco- nomic damages will often drag the non- economic damages down. If the econom- ic portion of a man’s life is valued at a mere $350,000 or even $1 million, then why should a jury award much more than that for noneconomic damages? There is a trend growing among trial
lawyers who regularly try wrongful death cases: Dump the economic damages at trial. Sometimes that decision is easy. In our Bakersfield trial, for example, our decedent had a legal alien registration
See Life, Page 42
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