They’re there to serve the oligarchy.
Content Notice: Aurora mass shooting and soul crushingly sociopathic lawyers.
The entire shtick of lone wolves is that the phenomenon itself is entirely predictable–an aggrieved cishet man, usually white, will, somewhere at some point in time, commit another mass shooting. But is impossible to actually predict which aggrieved cishet man will do this, when they will do it, or where.
So when victims of the Aurora shooting tried to sue Cinemax for damages, I thought it was absurd. The courts–not unfairly–argued there was no way the theatre could anticipate the attack, and so the lawsuit was defeated.
But the multi billion dollar company, instead of moving the fuck on, decided it was going to get the victims–half of whom are paralyzed–to recover their legal costs, around $700k in total. And the courts ruled in favour of Cinemax.
Let that sink in. A multi billion dollar company is going to milk shooting victims to recover legal costs which are chump change to the company’s assets, a debt which would devastate any single working class person, never mind someone disabled.
Cinemax and their lawyers were right to challenge the first lawsuit, but they have sailed way past any moral high ground. The relative worth of the legal costs to Cinemax is a drop in the bucket, but they feel justified in trying to kick shooting victims while they’re down. Cinemax’s legal counsel don’t even deserve to be considered human. They won their case, they should’ve just fucking dropped it.
*spit*
-Shiv
While it is standard and generally just that the losing side pays the legal cost*, it’s really bad taste in this particular case as the two sides are very unequal.
*We were once sued for a few thousand bucks . After we won the losing side tried everything so they wouldn’t have to pay our full cost.
Given two peers, sure. And I imagine that’s what lawmakers had in mind when they designed these policies. But if I owned Cinemax, I would recognise that bilking people with permanent injuries is untenable and would simply absorb the cost of the trial.
Assuming coming into wealth didn’t manage to dislodge my conscience.
It’s a problem. On one hand, you want people who launch ridiculous suits to suffer a significant reversal and regret it.
If I were the CEO of cinemax I’d probably do the same thing, especially to crush the ambulance-chasers who didn’t give their clients good counsel along the lines of “uh, no.” That $700k is the ambulance-chasers’ over-inflated fee for the debacle. Take their money and spend some of it filing some complaints with the local bar association, then give the balance to a fund for the victims – essentially paying the victims a settlement with their own lawyers’ money.
I feel a great deal of sympathy for the victims, but their going after cinemax was not behavior that should be rewarded.
Besides, the ambulance-chasers are going to declare bankruptcy anyway. Nobody’s ever going to see a cent of the money.