Wrongful death damages need to be brought to life. To appreciate the extent of one’s loss it is sometimes said that you need to look for the “violin”. What that means is that to appreciate the extent of loss for one that has suffered an arm amputation you need to inquire as to whether or not the person was a violin player. If so, then the loss is especially devastating.
In developing the damages in a wrongful death claim you need to look for the violin.
There are several other considerations:
- Wrongful death claims should be brought to trial as quickly as possible because the survivors change, adjust and move on to new relationships. The case needs to be presented to a jury before that happens.
- The decedent’s life expectancy and work life expectancy have to be established. To do that the entire medical history of the decedent and probably also the entire medical history of the beneficiaries needs to be established.
- Explore whether or not the decedent experienced any conscious pain and suffering before death.
- Develop the pecuniary loss suffered by the survivors as seen not only in the loss of earnings but also in the value of the services that the decedent performed for the family and the reasonable cost of replacing those services. For instance, what does it cost to replace the services of a stay at home parent?
- To fully appreciate the extent of grief and bereavement paint a picture of the decedent’s home and chronicle the decedent’s life through pictures. Visit the decedent’s gravesite to determine how far the family must travel to visit.
- The use of a grief expert may be necessary to help the jury understand not only what the survivors have gone through but what they will go through in the future.
- The grief expert may want to consider administering the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory to establish the degree of each survivor’s emotional injury.
- Consideration also needs to be given to the existence of any survival claims, i.e. the personal injury claim that the decedent had before death. This is where an autopsy may be necessary to prove not only how death occurred but also when it occurred and what the decedent experienced up to the time of death.
- Some books that may help develop these theories are Motherless Daughters, The Legacy of Loss by Hope Adelman and The Loss That is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of Early Death of a Mother or Father by Maxine Harris.
Another element of damage for a claim like this is what is called hedonic damages i.e. the loss of enjoyment of life. To prove this type of claim there may be a need to put on expert testimony through a psychologist plus an economist who can testify as to hedonic damages. Evidence of how certain federal agencies evaluate human life can be seen in the fact that seatbelts save 1 person in 10,000 yet the cost of these seatbelts is dramatic. That cost figure may be evidence of the value of one life. The Occupational and Safety and Health Administration has placed a value of $2 million on an unknown American to justify the agency’s willingness to require safety devices in the work environment.
For more information on wrongful death see the other pages in this site.
