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| Still image of Titan wreckage from USCG video (below). |
As The New York Times reported yesterday (subscription), a U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) inquiry into the underwater implosion of the Titan submersible (60 Minutes Austl.) has raised doubts over whether the five persons who died on the voyage knew they were in trouble. The family of one crew member filed a $50 million lawsuit against the sub manufacturer in August (N.Y. Times).
Titan was capable of dropping all of its weights to surface rapidly in an emergency. It was known before the present inquiry that Titan had dropped weights before the implosion, and experts read that as a sign that the crew knew they were in trouble. The inquiry so far has revealed, though, that Titan might have dropped only some weights as part of its routine surfacing procedure, and that communications with the surface suggested no cognizance of the impending disaster.
The rapid compression resulting from compromise of the Titan's hull at a depth of 3,346 meters (10,978 feet) would have raised the temperature in the sub so quickly as to incinerate the interior in a split second. So if the crew did know there was trouble, they did not know for long.
Remotely-operated-vehicle video of Titan tail cone on seafloor (USCG).
Besides the natural desire of victims' families to understand what their loved ones experienced in their last moments of consciousness, the question of conscious awareness of impending death points to a curious problem of damages doctrine in tort law.
In its long history, Anglo-American common law has struggled with the problem of compensation in event of accidental death. The conventional approach to calculate damages in tort law asks what it would take to restore a plaintiff to status quo ante, as if the accident had not occurred. When a loss is non-economic, such as physical injury or emotional distress, the loss is nonetheless quantified as financial compensation.
The problem in a death case, besides the obvious difficulty of quantifying life itself, is that there is no plaintiff to compensate. The person who experiences loss of life can in no sense be made to feel restored; she or he can derive no satisfaction from a financial award, nor even spend it. So what is the social utility in transferring wealth from a responsible defendant to a non-corporeal estate?
Tort law does mean to accomplish more than mere compensation. Tort awards set norms for socially acceptable conduct, deter others from misconduct, and keep the peace by cooling the vengeful desires of a victim's kin. So the law of accidental death came around in the 19th and 20th centuries to compensate surviving family for at least some of the losses that they suffer upon the death of a loved one; and also to compensate a decedent's estate for what the decedent suffered while alive.
That latter measure incorporates a serious limitation: the decedent's suffering necessarily ended at the time of death. Compensation of an estate thus poses a peculiar problem in a narrow class of cases. Should the estate receive anything at all when a person dies instantly? If so, what is the measure of suffering?
In modern times, airline disasters especially added another twist to the problem. One could imagine that airplane passengers sometimes are conscious of an impending crash. They therefore suffer emotionally. But they suffer before the crash. American law on negligence and strict liability compensates emotional distress only when it is a consequence of physical injury. The doomed airline passengers experienced physical injury and death simultaneously; there was no consequential emotional distress. So there is, again, no basis on which a tort award can be measured out.
Is there really, though, a legally significant difference between, on the one hand, suffering for moments after impact and before death, and, on the other hand, suffering for moments before impact and before death? Personally, I'd like to avoid both. And the toll on kin, the revelation of a loved one's suffering for moments in anticipation of death, seems about the same whether before or after impact.
Accordingly, many courts faced with such cases have been willing to suspend the usual rule of causation and award an estate damages for "pre-impact fear," if only in this narrow class of cases when it could be proved, at least by circumstantial evidence, that the decedent suffered emotional trauma upon an awareness of impending death.
The solution creates collateral problems, namely: in evidence, as to how one proves the pre-impact state of mind of a person who perished; and in torts, in the valuation of damages, for fear that jurors might let the fact of physical fatality improperly amplify their assessment of only momentary and purely emotional suffering. These problems are surmountable, if one decides they should be, through adversarial process, careful jury instructions, and court supervision.
American jurisdictions remain reluctant, though, to compensate for life itself. So damages awarded to wrongful death complainants, the kin of decedents, still are measured according to their losses, such as financial support and loss of companionship. However remunerative, that approach can leave victims' families feeling like the lives of their loved ones were undervalued by the legal system, and the loss of life was insufficiently impressed upon the defendant. After all, if there were no kin, there would be no liability.
An award for pre-impact fear usually is small, because of the short time frame in which the harm occurs. But the award can be important symbolically to victims' families, because, in the absence of compensation for life itself, the modest award for pre-impact fear at least recognizes suffering in the decedent's confrontation with mortality.
In the Titan case, then, a revelation of instant death might bear a bittersweet edge for families. Certainly, they would like to know that their loved ones did not suffer at all and had no cognizance of their fate aboard the sub. At the same time, a revelation of instant death will mean that the victims bore no compensable suffering, even pre-impact. In tandem with a failure to compensate for life itself, victims' families might well conclude that the legal system failed to recognize the fullness of their loss.
There are, by the way, better ways to handle wrongful death. The gold standard for my money was articulated by my friend and former colleague Andrew McClurg in his Dead Sorrow: A Story About Loss and a New Theory of Wrongful Death Damages, 85 B.U. L. Rev. 1 (2005).