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Originally Posted by blaise
Well they spend tens of millions of dollars not taking it seriously every year.
You wouldn't have much trouble showing duty or breach of duty. The prison is responsible for the inmate, they allowed him the drugs knowing he was at risk for suicide.
There are plenty of juries that would award money, Would it be tens of millions? No. But there's plenty of cases of juries awarding money for cases that don't seem to warrant it. You can't just say, "No jury would award damages." The prison would probably settle without even going to trial. You'd probably have the prison attorney having to investigate, prepare paperwork, get statements, etc. and they're probably not even the ones that would argue in court. They would probably hand the case to someone else. That's a lot of time and money. If this guy had died, and his family sued, they would get something, and it would be more than $1. The prison would most likely cut them a check. You can't just say, "He was going to die. His life wasn't worth anything" in court. It would sound too callous.
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One of us was in courtroom 101 today. One of us is just typing some shit into google and mixing that with some seriously skewed pre-conceived notions of the justice system. You seriously don't get it.
Assuming (and this is a very large assumption), that the family could get a lawyer to take the case, and then manage to prove liability. The damages would literally be that the man died one day before he was going to die anyway. If they somehow managed to win a verdict, it would be of the symbolic variety. $1 verdicts happen all the time. And you have a much bigger problem on liability than you think. It isn't worth breaking it down.
Its the same reason that its hard to win medical malpractice cases when the patient was terminally ill. Even when you win, its pyrrhic.