Jury gives $14 mil to skier paralyzed at Snoqalmie

[JayB]

Yes. No one can hurt themselves on nordic jumps. I didn't watch an Olympic caliber athelete completely eat-shit on the immaculately engineered landing slope and get hauled off in an ambulance at lake placid last summer either, so the odds that anyone ever got hurt on the mythical ski-jumps of yore despite inferior training, equipment, and facilities is clearly zero.

 

Your postulate here depends on the existence of big gaper-proof jumps and an a set of objective, ISO9001-compliant guidelines that provide a set of universally valid parameters for designing the same. No such things exist, nor could they ever. No matter how a jump is designed, built, and maintained, there's absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent people from injuring themselves on them, nor is there a statistical algorithm that could ever be used to transform injury rates into some kind of definitive "danger" classification scheme.

 

What about rails? All rails are inherently dangerous, and when they're designed so that you have to clear a gap and pop-90 before hitting them, the danger increases. Throw in some kinks and the danger increases. How does your gaper-proof engineering argument apply here?

 

What about cornices? Clearly dangerous. They are also there at the resorts discretion, as they could easily blow them away, design windfoils or some other such contraption to prevent them from building-up in the first place, build 50 foot chain-link fences around the lips, and hire off-duty cops to forcibly prevent anyone from hitting whatever remnant-cornices exist despite the precautions? Ditto for other cliffs. They could easily be "engineered" away with a judicious set of controlled detonations.

 

Your commitment to this transparently absurd notion that you can eliminate all risk in terrain parks, much less anywhere else on the mountain, and that resorts are responsible for doing so seems to have more to do with ideological commitments that you've cultivated off the slope than any objective merits that this particular case actually has.

[cj001f]

So you can imagine no situation where a resort should be held liable for poorly designed or maintained structures or features?

 

I'm not saying the resort was 100% at fault in this instance, nor have I ever said that zero risk resorts can or should be created. Only a fool would rush to judgement on this case based on newspaper reports. What I am is decidedly not willing to set a precedent that resorts can never be held responsible for what amounts to an amusement park.

 

Absolving corporations of all responsibility would be your ideology, no? They are, afterall, always acting in our best interest?

[JayB]

Now the real basis for the argument emerges. If all ski-resorts were run as non-profit collectives than the emotional perogatives that have substituted for logic and reason here would vanish.

 

Not holding a resort liable for a case where someone made a decision to hit a jump that was clearly identified as such and partitioned from the rest of the run, and the same someone made a series of massively negligent and rash choices with respect to the manner in which he hit it, which resulted in him massively overshooting the landing and crippling himself hardly constitutes a blanket exemption from all liability. Holding resorts accountable for the gross negligence of their visitors is one thing, holding them accountable for their own negligence is quite another. You are clearly arguing for the former rather than the latter.

 

 

 

 

[cj001f]

Not holding a resort liable for a case where someone made a decision to hit a jump that was clearly identified as such and partitioned from the rest of the run, and the same someone made a series of massively negligent and rash choices with respect to the manner in which he hit it, which resulted in him massively overshooting the landing and crippling himself hardly constitutes a blanket exemption from all liability. Holding resorts accountable for the gross negligence of their visitors is one thing, holding them accountable for their own negligence is quite another. You are clearly arguing for the former rather than the latter.

 

Oh my! It looks like we have one of the expert witnesses from the case testifying - he's got all the facts at his fingertips! He's managed to establish the guest was grossly negligent without ever going to the courtroom!

 

15 accidents on that same jump that same season were admitted into evidence. 8 people tobogganed away from that jump in the weeks preceding it including a broken back. That's pretty damn high in my experience, even compared to the T-Line summer camps. It would seriously suggest either the jump is badly designed or the Seattle area has a substantially larger population of gaper park rats. Fixing either of those is cheap for the report, certainly cheaper than the increase in their insurance premium.

 

Like I said, only a fool would rush to judgement based on a newspaper report.

[JayB]

"I find it amazing that so many people say that jump was not safe for use, with some concocted notion of “proper engineering.” I hit that same jump only two days before that one guy died on it, and roughly around the same time when Kenny went ahead and got paralyzed. Despite being far less experienced than I am now, that thing was barely a blip on my radar screen; it just wasn't much of a jump."

 

Eagerly awaiting the argument that resorts that don't encase all trees within six feet of memory-foam in the wake of the Sonny Bono incident are grossly negligent....

[cj001f]

Kenny and Peter, the guy who died, weren't skiing on the same jump, so the witness has some issues with his testimony.

 

Again, data would suggest that jump had a higher than average injury rate. I would have thought the normal functionally retarded resort employee would have changed something, apparently that wasn't the case.

[JayB]

15 injuries in a season doesn't seem terribly out of line for me. I've seen a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and a concussion on the same jump within 15 minutes of each other on a mid-sized jump that probably got hit over 10 thousand times in the course of a season. Gaper, Gaper, idiot-hucker backflip attempt. Last one is lucky he didn't die.

 

Might as well outlaw mogul runs if injuries per season is the sole determinant of negligence here.

[cj001f]

I'd be glad to see every ski resort in the US dead - good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

I never saw that many injuries when I was patrolling, but hey, whatever dood. You are beginning to sound like a Masshole

[Fairweather]

Of course, Cj, nobody deserves to enjoy our mountains under any conditions other then those prescribed by you own enviro-puritan vision. Why do liberals insist on seeing only misery and darkness any time ordinary people are simply enjoying themselves? Is your life really that unhappy? The mountains don't belong to you alone.

[cj001f]

Of course, Cj, nobody deserves to enjoy our mountains under any conditions other then those prescribed by you own enviro-puritan vision. Why do liberals insist on seeing only misery and darkness any time ordinary people are simply enjoying themselves? Is your life really that unhappy? The mountains don't belong to you alone.

 

Huh? If ski areas close the terrain park due to "unsafe conditions" and close runs due to "unsafe conditions" then can fine me for skiing there even if I take personal responsibility for my actions. Yes, I think the resort holds responsibility for their terrain when they've opened it.

 

I'd much rather US resorts operate with a business model of only being responsible for lift service and groomed terrain - and anyone who wants to access other terrain from their lifts is free to do so and holds complete fiscal responsibility for any actions that occur when they do access said terrain including rescue of themselves and others.

 

I find the nannying without accountability of the US ski areas intolerable - if you are going to look after me, do it well. If you aren't going to look after me, let me make up my own mind. Don't charge me for nannying but leave me holding the bag.

[Fairweather]

I'd be glad to see every ski resort in the US dead - good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

 

...and now you're talking sideways? Nice try.

[JayB]

I think that the "accountability-for-all-actions-no-matter-what-the-condition-of-the-terrain" model being argued for here makes a lot of sense.

 

Someone attempts to straight-line through in-bounds glades and dies, and the resort didn't have NASA engineers come out and insure that the distribution, girth, and limb-protrusion stats were optimized for a particular pitch and snow-conditions for all conceivable lines at all conceivable speeds by all conceivable skill-levels then the resort is clearly at fault and needs to be held accountable.

[cj001f]

I'd be glad to see every ski resort in the US dead - good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

 

...and now you're talking sideways? Nice try.

 

When was the last time you skied in the US Fairweather? They all subscribe to the nanny model.

 

Ahh JayB. Your resistance of trial by jury is so touchingly liberal. After all, democracy is all well and good when it gets the result you want. Refuting statistics at the same time? You sure you aren't a Kennedy?

[JayB]

I think democracy is valuable only to the extent that it operates within a constitutional framework that promotes the preservation of liberty, but that's a topic for a different forum.

 

But,...Yes. A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires accepting that it works perfectly every time. If the OJ trial taught us anything, its that we can trust juries to reach logically sound, factually correct conclusions in all cases. Thank goodness there's no mechanism built into the judicial system that might mitigate, correct, dilute, or confound the eternal, sublime, platonic truths that emerge from their deliberations.

[catbirdseat]

If the OJ trial taught us anything, its that we can trust juries to reach logically sound, factually correct conclusions in all cases. Thank goodness there's no mechanism built into the judicial system that might mitigate, correct, dilute, or confound the eternal, sublime, platonic truths that emerge from their deliberations.

I think you meant to say "cannot trust juries".

[catbirdseat]

I'd be glad to see every ski resort in the US dead - good riddance to bad rubbish.

 

 

...and now you're talking sideways? Nice try.

 

When was the last time you skied in the US Fairweather? They all subscribe to the nanny model.

 

Ahh JayB. Your resistance of trial by jury is so touchingly liberal. After all, democracy is all well and good when it gets the result you want. Refuting statistics at the same time? You sure you aren't a Kennedy?

If you want to see what happens when you don't have juries, just look at Japan. 90% of the time they get a confession out of the defendant.

[cj001f]

I think you meant to say "cannot trust juries".

 

All I heard was the sound of jackboots

[Fairweather]

I can hear Cj now as he stumbles, bleary-eyed, blistered, exhausted and thirsty, down the long root and rock festooned trail, all-the-while cursing the national park trail crew that failed to properly groom his path and muttering his lawyer's phone number under his breath.

[cj001f]

ahh.. another product of American public schools.

 

Check out my new Tee:

 

 

[Fairweather]

ahh.. another product of American public schools.

 

Sad, but true. My mommy and daddy couldn't afford to send me to a private prep school like yours did - or send me on big world adventures well into my late 20's. I guess yours are still hoping you'll find yourself?

[cj001f]

If I were that country club elite I'd be a conservative. But hey, if it helps you to think thats the only way to see the world, so be it.

[Serenity]

It looks to me like you could probably argue your point endlessly CJ, but you're not winning any converts.

[cj001f]

It looks to me like you could probably argue your point endlessly CJ, but you're not winning any converts.

 

You think internet debates are about winning converts?

 

 

[mattp]

A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires accepting that it works perfectly every time.

 

That is one of the sillier things you've ever posted, Mr B. Of course the jury system will not work perfectly every time. No system will. A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires simple acceptance of nothing, but it requires a belief (hopefully based in fact) that the jury system works better than other alternatives.

 

I thought you were a smart guy.

[JayB]

I thought that the sarcasm the permeated that post would be obvious.

Let's read this again:

 

"A general acceptance of the merits of the jury system requires accepting that it works perfectly every time. If the OJ trial taught us anything, its that we can trust juries to reach logically sound, factually correct conclusions in all cases. Thank goodness there's no mechanism built into the judicial system that might mitigate, correct, dilute, or confound the eternal, sublime, platonic truths that emerge from their deliberations."

 

I mean come on, folks....

 

I was trying to make the same point that you did in your post in response to Carl's assertion that anyone who contests the legitimacy of a single jury's decision is somehow attacking the jury system as a whole.

 

I'm very sympathetic to this guy's plight, but I still think that the jury made the wrong decision, and that both this judgment and the precedent that it sets have the potential to be quite harmful to skiers and skiing, and that anyone who thinks that this will only affect park skiing is mistaken. I can think of a million other cases where this definition of liability would apply, and if the judgment stands, probably will.