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Editorial: Tort reform law needs a fix

The Columbus Dispatch
December 20, 2016

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2016/12/20/tort-reform-law-needs-a-fix.html

An Ohio Supreme Court ruling reducing damages a jury awarded to a child raped by her church pastor is a sickening miscarriage of justice: But the fault lies not with the justices, whose job is to determine whether laws are constitutional, not second-guess laws. Instead, this is a case of the Ohio legislature using too broad a brush.

It’s hard to believe that the General Assembly and Gov. Bob Taft intended to protect a predator when they enacted tort reform in 2005. The law aimed to curb frivolous lawsuits and runaway jury awards over things such as defective medications, unsafe cars and slip-and-fall accidents — massive civil damages that Republican lawmakers and the insurance industry said were chasing businesses out of Ohio, hurting the economy.

At the time, minority Democratic House members introduced a bill to exempt sexual-abuse victims from the damages cap, but that never passed.

Now is a good time to revisit this amendment.

Despite a jury awarding $3.5 million to the young woman, the tort reform caps mean she can collect just $250,000 in pain-and-suffering damages.

The girl was just 15 when she was raped at Sunbury Grace Brethren Church in Delaware County in 2008 by the Rev. Brian L. Williams, now 54. He pleaded guilty to sexual battery and was released from prison in July after serving eight years.

The jury found Grace Brethren Church negligent for failing to act or investigate when some church officials learned that Williams previously had been accused of sexually related misconduct with other girls.

In this case, a duly impaneled jury that heard the evidence was in a better position than a long-ago legislature to determine what the appropriate level of compensation should be. The young woman remains traumatized, and her attorney says she faces a lifetime of psychiatric care. But justices had their hands tied because the 2005 law limited damages awarded by a jury for “pain and suffering” to $250,000.

The court ruled 3-2 that the state’s cap also applied to the rape victim’s case.

Justices Paul E. Pfeifer and William M. O’Neill “wrote withering dissents castigating lawmakers for imposing limits on civil damages, a decision they said should be up to juries,” Dispatch Reporter Randy Ludlow reported.

Pfeifer wrote: “It turns out that ‘tort reform’ (and the justices who sanctioned it) also ensured that rapists and those who enable them will not have to pay the full measure of damages they cause — even if they rape a child.”

This situation should be remedied quickly by the new General Assembly, though a lawyer for the girl isn’t optimistic: “Given the extraordinary influence of the insurance industry within the legislature, I am not optimistic they will do anything about it,” said John K. Fitch of Columbus.

Ohio’s tort reform has dramatically curtailed medical malpractice claims, which dropped 41 percent between 2005 and 2010. Payments over that period declined 38 percent. And doctors’ medical-malpractice rates dropped more than 26 percent. Without the enormous financial incentive of a whopping jury award, a lot of lawsuits were never filed; other cases were settled out of court.

But there’s a massive difference between a person hurt by accident and a child intentionally raped. Ohio’s House and Senate members should consider how they’d feel if this was their child. The one-size-fits-all 2005 law hurts Ohioans.

As Justice O’Neill wrote: “Shame on the General Assembly.”




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