Suicide Payoff

A subway jump nets $650,000

It was the kind of case whose outcome seemed to justify Mr. Bumble's judgment that "the law is a ass." A man who jumped in front of a subway train in an attempt to kill himself sued the local transit authority--and won a $650,000 settlement. Only in New York, a smug outlander might be tempted to say. In theory, though, it could have occurred in most states, a dumbfounding example of how a needed legal reform can be pushed to the edge of irrationality.

In 1977, Milo Stephens Jr., a 19-year-old with a long history of emotional disturbance, threw himself into the path of a subway train as it pulled into a station on Manhattan's East Side. One of the cars ran over him, severing a leg, one arm and part of the other. Several months later his family retained Aaron Broder, an enterprising personal-injury lawyer, who sued the New York City Transit Authority for negligence. Broder acknowledged that Stephens had put himself at risk by jumping, but he was prepared to try to prove that the motorman had been negligently slow in stopping. "He certainly didn't do this intentionally," says Broder, "but sometimes people do not react quickly enough."

A decade ago, the legal doctrine of contributory negligence might have barred such a suit because damages usually were not awarded if the victim was to blame in any way. The new rules, known as comparative negligence, allow a jury to assess the percentage of fault on each side and apportion damages accordingly.

That is what worried Richard Bernard, general counsel for the Transit Authority.

Stephens' injuries, based on other recent jury awards, "would have justified a verdict of, say, $3.5 million," observes Bernard. If the jury then found that Stephens was only 75% responsible for the accident, the Transit Authority might have been liable for $875,000, plus the cost of going to trial, thus making a $650,000 settlement "favorable from our point of view."

Not necessarily, says Law Professor John Wade of Vanderbilt University, who helped write the model statute on which the New York law is based. Unless the motorman was guilty of gross recklessness, Wade contends, no jury would blame him. "Even if there was some negligence on the part of the subway driver," he says, jurors would cut the award "down to practically nothing."

Stephens' personal story has a bizarre postcript: in 1982 he again managed to hurl himself in front of a moving subway train. But the Transit Authority need not fear another large lawsuit; this time he was not seriously injured.