In order not to get into a hot debate on the newly decided US Supreme Court case on Medellin regarding a long dispute in US’s violation to provide consular access to foreigners and a relationship between domestic court and ICJ (lots of discussion can be found on http://www.opiniojuris.org/), I have found something of interesting and, of course, less controversial.
In 1985, Kurt Parrott, a 15-year old, was thrown from his motorcycle in Opelika, Alabama. The buckle of his helmet failed, and he died when his bare head hit the pavement. Mr. Parrott’s mother sued the Italian company that made the helmet, and an Alabama court awarded her 1$ million!
Of course, the company refused to pay thus the Parrott family sought to collect the damage in Italy. However, their attempt was rejected by the Italian Supreme Court.
The court reasoned its decision that the notion of punitive damages within a common law country is so offensive to Italian notions of justice that it would not in any circumstance enforce the Alabama judgment. Moreover as the court further explained, private lawsuits brought by injured people should have only one goal – compensation for an actual loss. Allowing separate awards meant to punish the defendant is a terrible idea. The idea of punishment should be dealt only by the criminal justice system, which has elaborate due process protections and disinterested prosecutors.
The court even emphasized that it is not fair for the defendant to obtain a windfall award beyond what they actually have lost. Furthermore, the system of ad hoc jury is even considered a poor substitute for the considered judgments of government safety regulators. (Source: New York Times)
This judgment seems to directly attack the basic root of the notion of punitive damage in a private suit. Of course, punitive damages have deep roots in American and English common law even though their nature has changed over time. Justice Stevens of the US Supreme Court wrote in 2001: “Until well into the 19th century, punitive damages frequently operated to compensate for intangible injuries like pain and suffering or emotional distress”. These days, it has been used to send out messages to large corporations, and to reward successful plaintiffs with all the costs they have lost – including all court fees.
Still, the possibility of a court awarding a huge amount of punitive awards consistently scares anyone. In 1995, a Mississippi court awarded $400 million punitive award against a Canadian company headlined newspapers and spurred huge tensions between Canada and the US for years.
Given that the decision as to the amount of the punitive damage award is entirely discretional – specific to each case and context, could there be any line to be drawn between a proper legitimate amount and an out-of-reality award?
At least, this sort of question seems heartless to Ms. Glebosky, Kurt’s mother. “A million-dollar award is really nothing. It is really not enough punish any large company in this day and age, and it certainly does not bring back Kurt.”
2 comments:
I really like this article. It's also one of the things Andrew Oswald and I have been working on in terms of trying to find a way to make compensations in court more scientifically grounded than what we have currently, which is a rule-of-thumb system.
I think the main question that can be asked here is -- who should be the one to decide how much compensation are to be given to victims?
It is, of course, extremely difficult for any judge (or jury) to imagine the impact of a death of our loved ones on our well-being if we have never experienced it before. So I could imagine scenarios where less-than-ideal or more-than-it-should-be-awarded compensation are given to the victims. As for the victims, the likelihood that they will not be able to imagine recovering from the emotional damage they are experiencing is also high. In other words, they are more than likely to mispredict their ability to adapt to these negative shocks if they haven't been experiencing it for long. Hence, whatever money the court can conjure up for them -- unless it's ridiculously high -- will always seem to be less than what they think they deserve.
So, I guess, even though both judges and victims are looking at the same bad life event (e.g. death), they are bound to be looking through different lenses.
For more discussion from my and Andrew on the calculation of compensatory damages, see http://www.powdthavee.co.uk/resources/JLSOsPow31Oct07.pdf
Thanks for your useful comment. As we have agreed, a question of who ans how to decide the amount of damage additional to the actual one is hard to resolve. It seems almost impossible to have an objective criteria that is applioable to every fact.
So most of the scholars tend to shift their focus on the procedural issue as opposed to the above substantive question. Rather than questioning the appropriateness of the amount of compensation, a question will instead be that: if the decision has been done based on a correct and balanced information? Is it done without a bad intent? Is it accorded with sufficicent due process? If all of that questions can be answered affirmatively, then it seems that the final judgement will be deemed correct, or at least a legitimate one.
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