A Terrifying Decision

Remarkably, a court recently upheld a jury verdict that found the owners of buildings that were terrorized more culpable than the terrorists.

A New York state appeals court upheld the jury's allocation of 68 percent of the blame for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the buildings. Citing the jury's finding that several explicit warnings were provided to the Port Authority by credible sources, including Scotland Yard, the majority of the blame (and corresponding damages) was placed on the Port Authority. Moreover, the court cited precedent that holds that an owner's negligence can be at least 50 percent to blame for harm even when the harm was caused by another party's deliberate actions.

"Defendant's negligence had been extraordinarily conducive of the terrorists' conduct -- so much so that the fulfilment [sic] of the terrorists' plot and the ensuing harm could with clear justification have been understood as primarily attributable to that negligence," the court ruled. "The intentional act [of the terrorists] causally did little more than bring the incipient catastrophic potential of the negligence to terrible fruition."

[we've a legal system broken at every level]

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