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Where's the blame?
Apr. 13th, 2010 12:26 pmAs you are probably aware, I'm not a fan of compensation culture, which generally makes life more expensive for a large number of people so that a small number of people can gain monetary compensation for something which in days gone by would have been termed "bad luck" or "you pays your money, you take your choice". And it's very much not-zero-sum, because the players inthe middle, the lawyers, cream off a significant proportion of the cash before it gets to the compensated.
However, a compensation culture is what we have, so it might at least be applied logically.
A crash between a car, driven by Ms Josie Murphy, and a lorry, owned by Smith News Trading, resulted in the deaths of two passengers in the car and serious injury to two other passengers.
Ms Murphy claimed that she had been hit by a lorry driver going through a red light, while the lorry driver asserted that he had gone through a green light, and that it was Ms Murphy who had gone through a red light.
It was an interesting case on three fronts, two of which the court considered.
First, the tachograph showed that the lorry driver was travelling at about 37mph, but the court found that he would have been unable to avoid the accident even if he had been travelling at 30mph, and that therefore the speed of the lorry was not a factor to be considered. In other words, in English law, excessive speed in and of itself is not enough to give liability. Causation needs to be shown. I'd be interested to see any legal cases where this argument had been put with regard to alcohol level. I had vaguely heard that, if one driver was over the limit, the law was, roughly, that he/she was at fault even if he/she wasn't at fault, if you see what I mean.
Second, the court ruled in favour of the lorry company on a "balance of probabilities", despite the lack of hard evidence. The lorry driver was experienced, whereas Ms Murphy had only passed her test 12 months before. Personally I find this a little bit dubious (the conclusion, not the use of a "balance of probabilities"). You could argue equally that the younger driver had taken her test more recently and was therefore more likely to be keenly aware of the rules of the road, less likely to be suffering from driver ennui, etc. I know for sure that I was far more careful and observant as a pedestrian when I was younger than I am today -- simply because, as time has gone on, you do so much observing that leads to nothing, that you stop observing. Then again, I'm a more observant driver than I was when inexperienced, perhaps because I drive much less often than I walk, so I have not reached the "ennui" stage. If you look at the history of recent train crashes as a result of ignored red lights, inexperience in driving a train does not seem to be positively correlated with an accident occurring.
Third, and this was the interesting point that was not covered by the court, and which puzzled me, Recorder Pittaway said that "I find that the position of the road works at the junction and accompanying signage caused her confusion..."
Whoah! It's long been a submission of mine that the excess of road signs on our roads is a factor in causing people to miss what is important - i.e., what is happening in front of you on the road. But it's rare that you'll have a Recorder explicitly stating it.
Surely, I would have thought, this would give Ms Murphy cause to sue the people who put up the confusing road signs? I eagerly anticipate cases in the courts brought against those who enjoy power without responsibility, and who, by drip-by-drip actions, cumulatively cause a serious mishap, but who nearly always escape any blame. Such people, perhaps not by mere coincidence, are often "regulators" -- in other words, those who seem to think that they are making things safer, and, equally often, are paid out of the public purse -- which leads to an inevitable attitude of "safety first".
This in turn leads to catastrophe theory. While one set of traffic lights will reduce crashes on that junction, a set of traffic lights on every junction will lead to people not seeing traffic lights. This is happening with red lights on railway lines, fluorescent jackets on streets, and so on. "An extra one" is seen as more safe, and indeed is more safe for that "extra one", but is slightly less safe for all the ones that went before. But blame can never be attributed for adding the extra one, but can be attributed for failing to add the extra one. So you can see which way the employee paid by the public purse is going to go. He or she certainly isn't going to be the one standing in front of the tank saying that "enough is enough".
And so we need people to exploit these rare cases of the legal profession explicitly blaming "safety first" deployers, just to hold back the tide of "safety first" thought, and bring about more of a "is there an overall gain as well as an individual gain?" line of thought.
+++++++
Then again, the Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act of 2007, which was meant to bring about some corporate responsibility for the private sector's more blatant safety fuck-ups, is not progressing too well.
Peter Eaton and his company Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings were jointly charged under this act following the death of one of Alexander Wright, a junior geologist (note the middle-class bias here btw. would the courts have been so stern if it had been a building site? I suspect not). He was killed in September 2008 in Stroud while taking soil samples. The sides of the trial pit he was in collapsed.
The charge is the first under Corporate Manslaughter Act.
Unfortunately, Eaton needs "urgent medical treatment", and the trial has been adjourned until at least October this year, a good 18 months after charges were first brought.
No-one knows how this is going to play out. Corporate manslaughter is definitely something that we need on the books, mainly because companies in the past that have obviously been as guilty as shit of systemic negligence have got away with murder (well, ok, manslaughter). But what you know and what you can prove are two different things. At least this act gives the courts a chance to give it a go.
_______________
However, a compensation culture is what we have, so it might at least be applied logically.
A crash between a car, driven by Ms Josie Murphy, and a lorry, owned by Smith News Trading, resulted in the deaths of two passengers in the car and serious injury to two other passengers.
Ms Murphy claimed that she had been hit by a lorry driver going through a red light, while the lorry driver asserted that he had gone through a green light, and that it was Ms Murphy who had gone through a red light.
It was an interesting case on three fronts, two of which the court considered.
First, the tachograph showed that the lorry driver was travelling at about 37mph, but the court found that he would have been unable to avoid the accident even if he had been travelling at 30mph, and that therefore the speed of the lorry was not a factor to be considered. In other words, in English law, excessive speed in and of itself is not enough to give liability. Causation needs to be shown. I'd be interested to see any legal cases where this argument had been put with regard to alcohol level. I had vaguely heard that, if one driver was over the limit, the law was, roughly, that he/she was at fault even if he/she wasn't at fault, if you see what I mean.
Second, the court ruled in favour of the lorry company on a "balance of probabilities", despite the lack of hard evidence. The lorry driver was experienced, whereas Ms Murphy had only passed her test 12 months before. Personally I find this a little bit dubious (the conclusion, not the use of a "balance of probabilities"). You could argue equally that the younger driver had taken her test more recently and was therefore more likely to be keenly aware of the rules of the road, less likely to be suffering from driver ennui, etc. I know for sure that I was far more careful and observant as a pedestrian when I was younger than I am today -- simply because, as time has gone on, you do so much observing that leads to nothing, that you stop observing. Then again, I'm a more observant driver than I was when inexperienced, perhaps because I drive much less often than I walk, so I have not reached the "ennui" stage. If you look at the history of recent train crashes as a result of ignored red lights, inexperience in driving a train does not seem to be positively correlated with an accident occurring.
Third, and this was the interesting point that was not covered by the court, and which puzzled me, Recorder Pittaway said that "I find that the position of the road works at the junction and accompanying signage caused her confusion..."
Whoah! It's long been a submission of mine that the excess of road signs on our roads is a factor in causing people to miss what is important - i.e., what is happening in front of you on the road. But it's rare that you'll have a Recorder explicitly stating it.
Surely, I would have thought, this would give Ms Murphy cause to sue the people who put up the confusing road signs? I eagerly anticipate cases in the courts brought against those who enjoy power without responsibility, and who, by drip-by-drip actions, cumulatively cause a serious mishap, but who nearly always escape any blame. Such people, perhaps not by mere coincidence, are often "regulators" -- in other words, those who seem to think that they are making things safer, and, equally often, are paid out of the public purse -- which leads to an inevitable attitude of "safety first".
This in turn leads to catastrophe theory. While one set of traffic lights will reduce crashes on that junction, a set of traffic lights on every junction will lead to people not seeing traffic lights. This is happening with red lights on railway lines, fluorescent jackets on streets, and so on. "An extra one" is seen as more safe, and indeed is more safe for that "extra one", but is slightly less safe for all the ones that went before. But blame can never be attributed for adding the extra one, but can be attributed for failing to add the extra one. So you can see which way the employee paid by the public purse is going to go. He or she certainly isn't going to be the one standing in front of the tank saying that "enough is enough".
And so we need people to exploit these rare cases of the legal profession explicitly blaming "safety first" deployers, just to hold back the tide of "safety first" thought, and bring about more of a "is there an overall gain as well as an individual gain?" line of thought.
+++++++
Then again, the Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act of 2007, which was meant to bring about some corporate responsibility for the private sector's more blatant safety fuck-ups, is not progressing too well.
Peter Eaton and his company Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings were jointly charged under this act following the death of one of Alexander Wright, a junior geologist (note the middle-class bias here btw. would the courts have been so stern if it had been a building site? I suspect not). He was killed in September 2008 in Stroud while taking soil samples. The sides of the trial pit he was in collapsed.
The charge is the first under Corporate Manslaughter Act.
Unfortunately, Eaton needs "urgent medical treatment", and the trial has been adjourned until at least October this year, a good 18 months after charges were first brought.
No-one knows how this is going to play out. Corporate manslaughter is definitely something that we need on the books, mainly because companies in the past that have obviously been as guilty as shit of systemic negligence have got away with murder (well, ok, manslaughter). But what you know and what you can prove are two different things. At least this act gives the courts a chance to give it a go.
_______________
