If you are involved in a car accident, slip and fall, construction accident or other incident where you suffer serious injury, you may have the ability to seek financial compensation for your injuries in a personal injury lawsuit. A successful personal injury claim requires an accident victim to establish that the negligent (i.e. unreasonably unsafe) conduct of the defendant “caused” injury to the plaintiff. While this may sound straightforward enough, the notion of cause is different as it is used in personal injury litigation than when the term is used in ordinary parlance.
There are two prongs to proving causation in a personal injury lawsuit which may vary slightly depending on the jurisdiction but generally include: (1) actual causation and (2) proximate causation. Actual causation is essentially what people normally think of when they say that an unsafe act “caused” injury to a victim. There is an uninterrupted chain of events in which the unsafe conduct of the defendant resulted in injury to the defendant. For example, a car runs a red light and T-bones another vehicle causing the vehicle occupant in the other vehicle to be thrown forward violently and suffer serious head and neck injuries.
This is an easy example, but the causal connection between a negligent party’s unsafe conduct and injuries suffered by an accident victim can be infinitely more tenuous. A little more sophisticated example might include a chain reaction collision where a vehicle slams into stopped traffic causing multiple vehicles to collide with the vehicle in front of them. Again, it is easy to understand that while the driver that started the collision did not actually collide directly with the last vehicle to suffer impact in the chain reaction collision, the driver that initiated the chain reaction accident was a “but for” cause of the injuries suffered by the last driver involved in the collision. If not for the unsafe driving of the first driver who failed to stop, occupants of the last vehicle would not have been injured.
Actual cause (also referred to as “but for cause”) is not the only sense in which the term “cause” is used in Mississippi personal injury lawsuits. There are certain situations when there is clearly a chain of events where it can be said that unsafe conduct resulted in injury where the connection is so convoluted and unforeseeable that liability is not imposed based on public policy. The key issue is foreseeability both in terms of a particular kind of unsafe conduct causing injury as well as the injury being within the scope of the risk that would be anticipated from such unsafe conduct.
A recent case involving a train that collided with a pedestrian provides a good illustration of this type of causation. In a Chicago case, a man was running to catch a train when another train hit the man who was tragically killed in the fatal train accident. A large body part of the man who was killed was propelled a hundred feet through the air and struck a woman who was waiting to catch yet another train to work. The woman suffered a broken leg, fractured wrist and shoulder injury. There was no question that if the man had not been running to catch his train that the woman would not have been injured. However, the question was whether the injury to the woman was a foreseeable risk of running across a railroad track to catch a train. The court ruled that the risk was foreseeable so the estate of the man who was killed had to compensate the woman for her injuries.
One other issue that must be considered when trying to understand “causation” as the term is used in personal injury litigation is the impact of intentional acts of third parties. Sometimes the intentional conduct of a third party may be considered a “superseding cause” that may cut off liability of a defendant. However, this is only the case if the act or hazard created by the third party is not a foreseeable consequence of the defendant’s conduct. Again, the best way to understand this distinction is by way of example. If a driver pushes a passenger out of a moving vehicle, the driver would likely be liable for injuries suffered in the fall. However, the driver might not be liable for additional injuries suffered if someone passing by mugs the passenger ejected from the vehicle. Although the driver still might be found to be liable if the passenger was ejected from the vehicle in a high crime area.
While the train accident might show the outer boundary of foreseeability in some respects, it is certainly the case that when running across a train track one might be hit and thrown into a bystander causing injury. The bottom line is that terms like “causation” may have very different meanings from the way these terms are used in everyday language. If you are injured by the negligent conduct of a third party, the experienced Mississippi personal injury attorneys at Barrett Law can help explain these complexities that may complicate your personal injury lawsuit. The experienced Mississippi personal injury attorneys at Barrett Law have been providing tenacious representation to personal injury victims for over 75 years. We provide diligent legal representation and impassioned advocacy so we invite you to call us today at 662-834-2376 to learn how we can help.