Following the Giants-Dodgers opening day game in 2011, Giants fan Bryan Stow was beaten by two Dodger fans in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. The brutal attack left Stow disabled with severe and permanent brain injuries. Yesterday, an LA jury returned a nearly $18 million verdict against the Dodgers (or more precisely, former owner Frank McCourt's defunct Dodger corporate entity). While $18 million is by no means chickenfeed, it was sure a lot less than the roughly $75 million LA plaintiff lawyer extraordinaire Tom Girardi asked jurors to award.
The case was highly publicized in Los Angeles over the past three years with plaintiff Bryan Stow becoming a deeply sympathetic figure and his assault a source of embarrassment for many Angelenos.
The case is also a good example of how jurors don't automatically allow sympathy to trump liability. Though jurors love to "make a statement," this fact pattern didn't seem to give them a clear path for doing so.
First, the two assailants were apprehended, pled guilty and are currently in prison. So there was no mystery left for jurors to solve and no way to punish Stow's actual attackers.
Second, the plaintiff was unable to show jurors any "smoking gun" evidence against the Dodgers, such as a reduced security budget or a failure to follow established security procedures. This likely made it much harder for plaintiff jurors to generate the high levels of anger toward the Dodgers that would have been necessary for a "statement" verdict.
Third, the attack took place following the game in the parking lot. This is certainly a much less supervised environment than inside the stadium itself during a game and is on the periphery of the area the Dodgers controlled. This likely further lowered the expectations that jurors' were able to place on the Dodgers.
So, the jury had the attackers identified and in jail, no truly incendiary evidence against the Dodgers or McCourt, and an attack that took place on the fringes of the ballclub's property. On balance, plaintiffs had an extremely strong damages case and a moderately weak liability case with the weak liability case keeping damages down to about a quarter of plaintiff's suggested amount.
The moral of this story: Sympathy doesn't necessarily trump liability.