Remarkable $16.5 million Wrongful Death Verdict - Sacramento radio station contest
Wrongful Death verdicts and settlements in the San Francisco Bay area and throughout the state have gone up a lot in recent years. This is one of the very few areas where juries seem to be more generous today than they were ten years ago. A recent verdict against a radio station in Sacramento, California makes this point.
As reported in a CBS news story, one of the participants in station KDND's contest, entitled "Hold your Wee for a WII," Jennifer Strange, died from water intoxication after drinking massive amounts of water, but not urinating, in order to win an endurance contest. Water intoxication is a little-known condition, often affecting runners who go overboard in their efforts to drink enough water in a marathon.
In the KDND case, the victim was a mother of three children, and was trying to win a WII for her kids. The verdict is especially large for case where the victim was not someone who pulls down a large income. A big part of the money recovered in many wrongful death cases is for anticipated future earnings of the person who died. So, in casese that do not have punitive damages, it's not common to see such a large verdice for someone without high earnings.
Why are awards up so much for wrongful death cases? I'd like to think it's because juries are placing a higher value on the loss of human life, but I haven't seen anything to support that. I never understood how wrongful death verdicts could be so low in the past, and of course some still are. It's hard for a family to accept it when a jury finds that their loved one's death was caused by another person or a company, but then values their loss at, say, $200,000.
What I think is driving up verdicts in some cases is the sense of outrage at the conduct that caused the death. In the Sacramento California case, it's easy to see how a jury could be appalled at the radio station for conducting such this contest. Also, when the jury knows that a big corporation is behind a someone getting sued can often relieve any juror's worries about bankrupting a person or small business.
