Modern Law

A year ago Tony Stewart was racing open wheeled cars on a local dirt track with a bunch of amateur race drivers. There was a minor kerfuffle between Tony’s car and one of the locals and the local guy’s car spun out and hit the wall. It doesn’t matter who was at fault in that part of the incident, because no real harm was done.

The local guy unstrapped and got out of his race car, and then ran down to the part of the track where the cars were continuing to circle under caution, lined up closely one behind another at about 50 mph. He darted close to Tony’s car to gesture and express his displeasure and was run over by Tony’s rear tire and killed.

Authorities investigated and found that the local guy had been smoking marijuana in quantity such that his judgement was likely to be impaired at the time of the incident and that the guy had left the safety of being strapped into his car and advanced into the close proximity of open wheeled cars traveling at 50 mph. They therefore concluded that Tony Stewart was not at fault in the local guy’s death.

The local guy’s parents have now filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Tony Stewart, seeking unspecified damages. Lawyers are talking about “future earnings their son would have provided them,”  and “pain and suffering their son experienced during the time he saw Stewart's car coming toward him.”

I’m not sure on what planet there is a reasonable expectation that a child would be providing his earnings to his parents, even assuming that the kid would turn out to be a successful race car driver; something that is actually very unlikely. Nor is there any part of this space-time continuum in which one person is reasonably compensated for another person’s pain and suffering.

Sort of like a guy killing his parents and then throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. In today’s legal system that would fly.