Pain and Suffering in a Death Case
A trial last year in Franklin County, Missouri, is an example of how the suffering of a victim in the moments before a fatal crash can affect the award of damages to the victim’s family.
In 2006 a crash of a skydiving plane resulted in the deaths of six people. The jury found that the manufacturer of an engine part was defective, causing an engine failure which preceded the crash. The defendant producer of a compressor turbine blade used a different alloy which sold for half the price of the metal called for by the engine manufacturer. The part broke causing the right engine to blow up shortly after takeoff.
An important claim made at trial to support the amount to be awarded was that the people aboard the plane knew that it was going to crash and suffered 52 seconds of “pre-impact terror”. In addition to the $4 million the jury awarded to the family of each victim, a further proceeding for punitive damages resulted in an additional $28 million.
Damages for pre-death pain and suffering in a wrongful death case, especially in a state like Maine where recovery for the loss of a loved one in a death case is severely limited, can be a very important part of the case, because the limitation on wrongful death damages does not apply to what happened before the death occurred, even if it was for only a very short period of time.
Category: Defective Product Liability
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