Charleston Families Argue That City Should NOT Be Kept In Lawsuit

The June 18, 2007 Charleston Sofa Super Store fire is in the headlines again, this time on the civil suit side. On March 12, 2010, the South Carolina Court of Appeals refused to dismiss an appeal filed by the store owners over a trial court ruling to dismiss the city of Charleston from the case. The city was dismissed from the suit last summer because under South Carolina law it is immune from liability. The families of eight of the nine the deceased firefighters had asked the Court of Appeals to dismiss the appeal. The parties have 30 days to submit their briefs.

Why would the families want to keep the city out of the civil law suit, while at the same time seek to have the fire chief and other city officials held criminally liable for the deaths? If the city is a defendant at trial, the owners of the Sofa Super Store can ask the jury to offset any liability they may have for the damages, by the percentage amount that the jury apportions to the city. The legal principle is called comparative negligence, and it allows a jury to apportion fault on a percentage basis among those defendants found to be at fault. For example, if the jury found that the city was 50% at fault for the deaths, the damages that the Super Sofa Store would potentially have to pay could be reduced by 50%.

Out of 30 defendants in the case, 19 have already have reached settlements totaling $8.4 million to the families. Remaining in the suit are the Sofa Super Store, its owners and operators, the Goldstein Family Limited Partnership; and a few contractors.

COMPARATIVE NEGLIGENCE EXPLAINED:

Under traditional law in the US, each defendant in a civil suit for negligence who was found to be at fault was liable to pay an equal share of the damages to the plaintiff. Basically, the damages were divided by the number of liable defendants.  Liability among the defendants was also considered to be joint, which meant that an injured party could collect the full amount of damages from any of the defendants (ie. the injured party was not limited to only collecting the pro-rata share from each defendant).  To make it clear – if A, B and C were liable for $300,000 in damages to D, each would be liable for $100,000. However, D could choose to sue only A and recover the full $300,000 from A. This was a big advantage to D in the event B and C had no money.

The traditional approach has been replaced by a system of comparative fault where the jury assigns a percentage of liability to each defendant. Under comparative fault, the damages that each defendant is liabile for is determined by multiplying the total damages by the percentage of fault that the jury assigned. If we use the scenareo mentioned above, if A was 50% at fault, B was 40% at fault, and C was 10% at fault, then A would be liable for $150,000, B would be liable for $120,000, and C would be liable for $30,000.

In many states, a defendant is only liable to the injured party for the amount of his/her comparative fault. In other states, a defendant who pays more than his/her assigned amount may make seek contribution from other defendants who were found to be liable but did not pay. In either case, it is to the advantage of the Sofa Super Store defendants to keep the city in the case. It is also a tactical disadvantage to the families to have the City in the suit, because the jury’s attention will inevitably be diverted away from the wrongful conduct of the Sofa Super Store, and focused on the fireground mistakes that were made by the fire department.

It is a bit ironic that the families are in the position of arguing that the fire chief and others should be liable criminally, but are arguing that they should not be held liable in the civil suit.