With the sudden loss of a loved one at the hands of someone else, it’s hard to ever quantify in a dollar amount how much damage that person caused because of their wrongful actions. Wrongful death suits make an attempt at doing so by allowing loved ones of the deceased to seek retribution through financial damages. In cases where that fault is determined to be a homicide, meaning possessing intent to kill, that form of retribution would come in the form of a trial and possible conviction to seek criminal fault. However, one could also seek retribution in civil court, when the death was the result of negligence or as a result of intentional action, a representative (or estate) of the deceased may file a wrongful death suit.
These suits allow the estate, or those in close relation to the deceased, to receive compensation by filing a lawsuit against the party that is allegedly liable for their death. States may have varying stipulations for filing a wrongful death suit, but they all follow the same applicability, burden of proof, and filer requirements for wrongful death suits.
In order to be applicable for a valid personal injury claim, the victim must be killed as a result of the defendant’s wrongful action in at least one of the three circumstances: the victim is intentionally killed, dies as a result of malpractice, and/or car accident fatalities involving negligence. The burden of proof is on the estate to prove in the case of negligence that the defendant owed the victim “a duty of care” that the defendant broke that duty, and it was a “direct and proximate cause of the death and that death caused the damages that the plaintiff is trying to recover.” In the case of intentional acts such as murder, no matter if the person was convicted in a criminal trial or not, the defendant can still be charged for wrongful death based on “a preponderance of the evidence.” The representative of the deceased would have to prove the person’s death was the result of an intent to cause harm to the deceased, and that the family members suffered financial damages because of the death. Additionally, in all states, a spouse can file a wrongful death action on behalf of his or her deceased spouse and parents of minors can file a suit if one of their children is killed. Minors can also collect compensation over the death of their parent.
The compensation can be derived from damages to the deceased person’s pre-death pain and suffering, medical treatment costs that deceased victim incurred as a result of the injury prior to death, loss of the deceased person’s expected income, value of the services that the deceased would have provided, among other categories of damages that can vary by state. The two most defining factors that can cause disparities between settlements are taking into account the loss of the deceased expected income and the cumulative value of that loss based on the presumed life expectancy of the deceased.
When the person is an adult with a certain wage and age, that can impact how much the estate is compensated. Racial and gender gaps can exist also for death settlements, which is attributed to the existing salary discrepancies that aggregately remain between gender and racial groups. Race tables and gender tables are also used to determine average life expectancy, which would further the discrepancy in death settlements as the average life expectancy varies with race and gender. The disparity is heightened based on the victim’s gender, age, and race when the victim is a minor, since there is no history of expected income.
In situations where the victim is a minor, gender and race-based data is used to calculate damage awards, and there aren’t any federal laws that prohibit the practice. California is the first state to prohibit the practice by enacting the SB 41: “the estimation, measure, or calculation of past, present, or future damages for lost earnings or impaired earning capacity resulting from personal injury or wrongful death from being reduced based on race, ethnicity, or gender.” The “loss of future earnings” is a type of compensatory damage awarded to give the income that the individual would have earned if they hadn’t passed. For children, the tables use two stages: predict educational attainment based on the child’s gender and race, and predict income for someone of that same race, gender, and educational level by calculating predicted educational attainment. This can create an inequality in compensation, where minors that are white victims versus a minority would have higher compensation values due to the average calculation of the expected income of a white individual versus if they were a minority. There also lies a difference in average life expectancy comparatively of someone who is white versus a minority, which would yield a higher compensation because the average white individual is likely to live longer than a person of color. The child’s gender is taken into account as well that can further reduce compensation based on average income and life expectancy differences between genders. There have been some federal courts that have struck down the use of these tables, but as much as they empowered to do so they are still often used by states. There haven’t been any constitutional assessments of the use of these tables by the Supreme Court. However, a possible option for equal compensation is compensation caps, which raises other concerns.
Compensation caps have the propensity to set a level playing field in wrongful death settlements, but they can raise issues. In terms of wrongful death suits caused by medical malpractice, there have been some states that have allowed statutory caps on compensation. At the same time, there have been states such as Ohio and Oklahoma that have state constitutional prohibitions on damage caps in cases of wrongful death. Other states such as Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington have state supreme courts that have struck down statutorily enacted malpractice damage caps. They’ve done this on the claim that such caps are violations to their equal protection statutes. These states have regarded caps as these as severing equal protection because no matter the damage ranging from permanent injuries to death, compensation would be standardized to always be the same.
Given the current death settlement compensation tables and the potential controversy of death settlement caps, it raises the question which solution is more just. Although, there is often a moral quandary that arises when attempting to put a dollar amount to someone’s life, is unequal payment for wrongful death have closer equity than damage caps? Or are standardized damage caps closer equality under law? Since the average livelihoods and statistics on distinct groups of people vary depending on the very factors used to make such settlement estimates, the law must choose between equity or equality since we don’t have equality of outcomes. That’s why under the current legal system, the price of one’s life can be determined before they’re even born.