Who Can Be Sued for Wrongful Death?
What is a wrongful death case?
A wrongful death case is a civil action brought by certain close surviving family members and dependents (wrongful death claimants) of a person whose death was caused by the wrongful acts or neglect of another. Those wrongful actions are the basis for a wrongful death claim. Wrongful death claims seek to compensate the surviving family members, not the decedent.
The losses that the wrongful death claimants can seek vary from state to state. In California, wrongful death claimants are entitled to certain economic and non-economic damages.
Economic damages include:
- The financial support, if any, that [name of decedent] would have contributed to the family during either the life expectancy that the decedent had before his death or the life expectancy of the claimant/plaintiff, whichever is shorter;
- The loss of gifts or benefits that the claimant/plaintiff would have
expected to receive from the decedent; and
- The reasonable value of household services that the decedent would have provided.
Future economic damages are reduced to present cash value.
Noneconomic damages include each claimant’s loss of the decedent’s love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, moral support, and in the case of a spouse, intimacy and sexual relations.
Noneconomic damages may not include the claimants’ feelings of grief or sorrow, but the losses that are allowed do allow juries to take into account the vast majority of each claimant’s intangible and emotional damages.
In California, a different claim often brought together with a wrongful death claim, called a “survival claim,” allows compensation for the decedent’s medical expenses from the injuries that caused death, funeral and burial expenses, and punitive damages against individual defendants (but not public entities like a city, county, or the state). And for deaths that happened after January 1, 2022, a California survival claim also allows damages for the decedent’s conscious pain and suffering before death. A California survival claim can only be brought by the closest relatives of the decedent, usually the decedent’s spouse and children.
Who May Be Sued for a Wrongful Death?
Almost anyone can be sued for wrongful death, including people, companies, organizations, and public entities. State by state, certain immunities may protect certain classes of people from suit for damages, especially certain government actors.
In California, these are a few examples of who could be sued for wrongful death:
- A police officer who wrongfully shoots and kills someone and the city, county, or state that employs him;
- A doctor who performed a faulty operation and hospital that employs him;
- A driver who ran over a person and company that employs him;
- A company that sold a dangerous product without adequate warnings;
- A jail nurse who failed to summon necessary medical care for a dying inmate and the company that employes her.
In these particular cases, the representative of the family has to prove to the court the same elements of a civil claim that the decent would have presented if he or she were alive. For a negligence claim, for example, the plaintiffs must prove that the defendant owed the decedent a duty of care, the duty was breached, that breach was a direct and proximate cause of the death, and that breach caused damages.
The wrongful act or neglect that caused death and can support a wrongful death claim can include any violation of a law or a common law duty, including civil rights violations.
The civil rights attorneys at Haddad & Sherwin LLP have a long track record of winning wrongful death cases with results that include large settlements and verdicts for their clients, groundbreaking legal rulings, and important reforms to prevent future harms. At this time, Haddad & Sherwin LLP only handles wrongful death cases in California.