Trial lawyers corrupt the culture turning on victims of terrorism

Quin Hillyer:

Something is badly wrong with our culture as well as our courts if terrorists can be found less culpable for their acts of terrorism than the owners of the buildings that were terrorized.

The buildings, in this case, are quite familiar — famous for no longer existing. They were known as the World Trade Center. Eight years before 9/11, terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the WTC garage, killing six and injuring hundreds.

On Wednesday, a New York state appeals court upheld a jury verdict that, for purposes of pending lawsuits for monetary damages, allocated 68 percent of the blame for the bombings on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Read that again. The Port Authority, which owned WTC, was held more than twice as responsible for the bombings as the bombers themselves. Next headlines: Up is down, black is white, and Hades is a cooler place than heaven. This case shows out-of-control litigation can reach beyond grasping plaintiffs lawyers to the judges on the bench.

Oh, sure, all of the legal niceties were observed. The jury weighed the evidence in a careful, step-by-step fashion. It noted several explicit warnings provided to the Port Authority by sources as credible as Scotland Yard that just such a bombing, carried out in precisely such a fashion, was possible.

And the appeals court reviewing the case cited ample precedent — albeit with at least one rather strained extrapolation — for its conclusion that owner’s negligence can be at least 50 percent to blame for harm even when the harm was caused by another party’s deliberate, “particularly heinous” actions.

But the appeals court went off the rails entirely when it moved from law to interpretation.

Just because the Port Authority was warned but took inadequate precautions, the court ruled, “the intentional act” of the terrorists “causally did little more than bring the incipient catastrophic potential of the negligence to terrible fruition.”

Moreover, it wrote, “defendant’s negligence had been extraordinarily conducive of the terrorists’ conduct — so much so that the fulfilment [sic] of the terrorists’ plot and the ensuing harm could with clear justification have been understood as primarily attributable to that negligence.”

In other words, by not protecting against murder, the Port Authority was “primarily” responsible for causing murder. The murderers, though, just did what any old murderers would do, indeed what they by an inexorable force of nature could not help but do once made aware of the opportunity. That’s why the murderers were less than one-third responsible for the harm!

Excuse the bluntness, but that’s just nuts.

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No wonder trial lawyers had to change the name of their organization. This is a blame the victim mentality on stilts. This is why liberals should never be permitted to be judges. They have selective compassion for various classes of victims and the ones with deeper pockets are terrorized again.