Medical Malpractice Law Firm MEDLawLegalTeam.com
Medical Negligence Lawyers: Janet, Jenner & Suggs LLC 1-888-4-MEDLAW: Medical Malpractice Lawsuits
Maryland Prescription Drug Injury Attorneys Physician and Nurse Attorneys
About Our Medical Malpractice Law FirmOur AttorneysPractice Areas: Medical Malpractice, Birth Injury, Cerebral Palsy, Prescription Drugs, Nursing Home AbuseLawsuit Verdicts & SettlementsFirm NewsLegal Law Firm ArticlesContact Our Lawyers
    CEREBRAL PALSY
Does your child have cerebral palsy? Could a doctor error have been the cause?.
 LEARN MORE

    MRI/NSF ALERT
The FDA has issued a warning for the use of Gadolinium based contrast agents used in MRI scans.
 LEARN MORE

 

The victim’s role

As in any lawsuit, humanizing your client is essential. In a concert injury case, you may face more of a challenge getting the jury to focus on your client as a person who was simply standing where he or she was allowed to be, doing what he or she was supposed to do. If the defendants try to blame the plaintiff, it is vital to argue that the victim did not assume the risk of being crushed in the festival seating area and did not engage in comparative negligence.

For a victim to have assumed a risk, completely barring recovery, he or she must have knowingly and voluntarily accepted the risk that caused the injury. For example, an entire body of case law denies recovery to fans hurt in the stands at baseball games because courts have concluded that the risk of harm is so “open and obvious” that anyone watching a game should know that he or she risks being hit by a ball.22 Since spectators can ensure their safety by staying in the screened area behind home plate, sitting anywhere else in the ballpark implies that the fan weighed the odds and made an informed choice. The defendant in that scenario bears no further duty.23

But festival-seating concertgoers are different from baseball fans. At a ball game, the assumption of risk bars any recovery because the risk of being hit by a ball is a “customary part of the sport.”24 Getting crushed by a crowd to the point of asphyxiation does not occur with the frequency, or fair warning, of getting hit by a foul ball. Yet even if concert disasters were more common and well publicized, that would still not relieve organizers or performers of their duty of care. On the contrary, when the parties putting on the concert “should anticipate an unreasonable risk of harm to the invitee notwithstanding his knowledge, warning, or the obvious nature of the condition, something more in the way of precautions may be required.”25

This is the principle to cite when a defendant mentions the warning in fine print on the back of a ticket, or the hastily scrawled signs inside the arena warning fans that they enter the festival seating area at their own risk. This further duty by the defendants applies to any venue, including those that stage rock concerts or festivals, “where there is reason to expect that the invitee’s attention will be distracted . . . or that after a lapse of time he may forget the existence of the condition, even though he has discovered it or been warned.”26

Similar logic applies to the defense that the victim was comparatively or contributorily negligent. To show that the victim’s injury was caused by overcrowding and inadequate security—not his or her own conduct—you must establish that your client could not find a “place of safety,” or that overcrowding restricted his or her free movement.27

In other words, no place in the festival seating area was safe, so it did not matter where in the crowd your client stood. Ready support for this proposition is in the NFPA’s Life Safety Code and the BOCA code, which says that the lack of adequate room to stand or move exposes patrons to the possibility of being crushed in the crowd anywhere in a festival seating area.

Defendants in crowd crush cases will probably have big names with big litigation budgets. While festival seating can exist anywhere there is no reserved seating, injuries are more likely in the bigger concert crowds at larger venues. Odds are, you will be taking on juggernauts like Clear Channel Communications, Infinity Broadcasting, or a municipal stadium authority.

If a radio station copromoted the concert, as is often the case, you may face Clear Channel Communications. According to its Web site (www.clearchannel.com), the company owns, programs, and sells airtime for over 1,200 radio stations in the United States.

Another likely defendant is SFX, a Viacom subsidiary that owns 44 U.S. amphitheaters and boasts on its Web site (www.sfx.com) that a “staggering 62 million people attend over 26,000 events” it promotes or produces each year. Given these companies’ huge income and the muscle of corporate parents like Viacom backing them up, you could be waking a sleeping giant.

Crowd crush cases may offer drama, but they are fundamentally simple, based on facts that should be self-evident: Overcrowding leads to injuries; a party that can reasonably foresee harm has a duty to prevent it; and where powerful interests insist on pursuing a dangerous practice like festival seating, the victims are truly protected only by their lawyers.

More Information on Crowd Safety >

Notes

1. Dan Klepal, Concert Goers Still Feel the Dangers Today,THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER (Dec. 3, 1999), available at www.enquirer.com/editions/1999/12/03/loc_concert_goers_still.html (last visited Apr. 23, 2004).

2. PAUL WERTHEIMER, CROWD MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES, ELEVENTH ROCK CONCERT SAFETY SURVEY (2003), available at www.crowdsafe.com/rcss11nr.pdf (last visited Apr. 23, 2004.

3. Alisa Wolf & John Nicholson,Safe Exit: Nightclub Safety Equals Life Safety, NAT’L FIRE PROT. ADMIN. J., July 8, 2003, available at www.nfpa.org/NFPAJournal/Exclusives/070803/070803.asp (last visited Apr. 23, 2004).

4. NAT’L FIRE PROT. ADMIN., LIFE SAFETY CODE HANDBOOK 2003, 3.3.188.1 (Ron P.E. Cote & Gregory E. Harrington eds., 9th ed. 2003).

5. Id. at A.3.3.188.1.

6. BLDG. OFFICIALS & CODE ADM’RS INC., THE BOCA NATIONAL BUILDING CODE/1996 (#301-96) 1008.1.5. (13th ed.1996).

7. See Wolf & Nicholson, supra note 3.

8. Larry Nager, Festival Seating Back for Springsteen Concert, CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, Aug. 7, 2002, available at www.enquirer.com/editions/2002/08/07/loc_festival_seating.html (last visited Apr. 23, 2004).

9. See Corey Moss, U2’s Festival Seating Plan Draws Fire, vh1.com, Jan. 11, 2001, at www.vh1.com/artists/news/1437876/01112001/u2.jhtml (last visited Apr. 23, 2004). See WERTHEIMER, supra note 2.

10. See Nager, supra note 8.

11. Moss, supra, note 9. See also Nager, supra note 8.

12. 162 N.E. 99, 100 (N.Y. 1928) In Palsgraf, the plaintiff’s claim failed. Because the dynamite was hidden in an innocent-looking bundle of newspapers, the court ruled, the railroad company could not have foreseen the danger and owed her no duty of care.

13. See, e.g., Williams v. Walnut Creek Amphitheater P’ship, 468 S.E.2d 501, 503 (N.C. Ct. App. 1996) (citations omitted); Coronel v. Chicago White Sox, Ltd., 595 N.E.2d 45, 47-48 (Ill. App. Ct. 1992).

14. Emphasis added. See also the Illustrations to Comment f of that section, which underscore that the operator of premises bears a duty to provide adequate security to prevent a foreseeable crowd crush.

15. Coronel, 595 N.E.2d 45, 46-48; see also Bellezzo v. State, 851 P.2d 847, 850 (Ariz. Ct. App. 1992).

16. See Massey v. Jim Crockett Promotions, Inc., 400 S.E.2d 876, 881 (W.Va. 1990).

17. McLaughlin v. Home Indem. Ins. Co., 361 So. 2d 1227, 1230 (La. Ct. App. 1978).

18. See Massey, 400 S.E.2d 876, 881, fn. 11.

19. See Plaintiffs’ Memorandum of Points and Authorities in Opposition to Defendant Mathers’ Motion to Dismiss at 8-9, Cunningham v. District of Columbia Sports & Entm’t Comm’n, No. 03-839 (D.D.C. filed Nov. 26, 2003).

20. Cunningham, No. 03-839 (order denying motion to dismiss at 7, citing Caldwell v. Bechtel, 631 F.2d 989, 1002 (D.C. Cir. 1980)).

21. See Hall v. E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co., 345 F. Supp. 353, 373-74 (E.D.N.Y. 1972).

22. See, e.g., Lawson v. Salt Lake Trappers, Inc., 901 P.2d 1013, 1015 (Utah 1995). See also Baker v. Mid Maine Med. Ctr., 499 A.2d 464 (Me. 1985); Pestalozzi v. Philadelphia Flyers Ltd., 576 A.2d 72 (Pa. Super. Ct. 1990).

23. See Lawson, 901 P.2d 1013, 1015; see also Swagger v. City of Crystal, 379 N.W.2d 183, 185-86 (Minn. Ct. App. 1986).

24. Gallagher v. Cleveland Browns Football Co., 638 N.E.2d 1082, 1089 (Ohio Ct. App. 1994).

25. Coronel, 595 N.E.2d 45, 50 (citing Ward v. K Mart Corp., 554 N.E.2d 223, 238 (Ill. 1990)(citing W. PAGE KEETON ET AL., PROSSER & KEETON ON THE LAW OF TORTS A761, at 427 (5th ed. 1984))).

26. Id. See also City of Milton v. Broxson, 514 So. 2d 1116, 1118 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1987) (citing WILLIAM L. PROSSER, LAW OF TORTS 394-95 (4th ed. 1971)).

27. Greenberg v. Sterling Doubleday Enter., 660 N.Y.S.2d 33, 34 (App. Div. 1997).
 
Legal Information
  Our team of legal / medical professionals includes:

» Board Certified OB/GYN Physician-Attorney

» Registered Nurse Paralegals, including a former labor and delivery nurse.

» Attorneys with combined experience of more than 150 years in medical malpractice and pharmaceutical negligence.

» Access to nationally known expert physicians.
 
 
The MEDLaw Legal Team of Medical Malpractice Lawyers ABOUT US  |  OUR LAWYERS  |  PRACTICE AREAS  |  VERDICTS & SETTLEMENTS  |  CONTACT US  |  SITE MAP
Copyright Janet, Jenner & Suggs, LLC, Attorneys At Law: MEDLAW Legal Team Baltimore, Maryland; Columbia, South Carolina; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Nationwide; Medical Malpractice Personal Injury Lawyers Pharmaceutical, Vioxx, Bextra, prescription drug injury, nursing home abuse malpractice, cerebral palsy, cancer misdiagnosis, bronchoscope injuries malpractice, serious injuries, Actiq, Baycol, Rezulin, Viga, Ancure, Accutane, Cypher Stent, Cordis, Neurontin, Salmeterol, Serevent, Advair, Cerebral Palsy, Prempro, hormone replacement therapy, injury lawyers. Janet, Jenner & Suggs, LLC, with any questions about this medical malpractice Web site.
Site by Consultwebs.com: Law Firm Website Designers / Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing