Reversal in eldercare case highlights limits of qualified immunity, low injury threshold of intentional torts

Boston police officer assists an elderly pedestrian in 2014.
(Alex Klavens CC BY 2.0 via Flickr)

A dispute over elder care occasioned treatment of qualified immunity and a range of tort theories by the Massachusetts Appeals Court yesterday.

Gallagher v. South Shore Hospital arose from an apparently mismanaged effort to investigate and redress a report of elder abuse; the report proved unfounded. The plaintiff caretaker and elder man alleged that a police officer and state agent entered their home without sufficient suspicion or warrant and removed the man from the home, and that a hospital then held and tested the man for five days against her and his will.

Most of the court's opinion comprised blow-by-blow facts and the Fourth Amendment analysis. However, the court opined as well on a range of common law tort claims against the defendants: a police officer, a state-contracted elder service agent, and South Shore Hospital, Inc., for trespass, false imprisonment, and battery. The police officer defended on grounds of qualified immunity, inter alia.

In proceedings on various motions, two trial court judges awarded summary judgment to all defendants. The trial courts held the state actors protected by qualified immunity and the tort claims flawed.

In the estimation of the Appeals Court, the trial courts erred. The Appeals Court reversed and remanded as to all defendants, finding that live questions of fact precluded the summary judgments. In my estimation, the error on qualified immunity was informative, and the errors on tort theories were egregious.

In articulating the qualified immunity theory, the police defendant and eldercare agent pointed to a concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh in a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court case, Caniglia v. Strom, in which the Court held unanimously that a warrantless home entry and firearm seizure violated the Fourth Amendment. The Appeals Court explained:

[Officer] Pompeo argues that the facts at bar are similar to the example of an elder welfare check that Justice Kavanaugh described in his concurring opinion in Caniglia. In his example, "an elderly man is uncharacteristically absent from Sunday church services and repeatedly fails to answer his phone throughout the day and night. A concerned relative calls the police and asks the officers to perform a wellness check." Justice Kavanaugh stated that "[o]f course," in those circumstances, the officers may enter the home. Pompeo argues that she reasonably thought [elder plaintiff] LaPlante was injured or in imminent danger on June 25 because no one responded to the doorbell, knocks, or telephone call, and because [caretaker] Gallagher had left LaPlante in the car with strangers two days earlier.

The trial court found these facts to constitute the requisite exigency to enter the home. The Appeals Court disagreed.

The facts in this case are nothing like the hypothetical Justice Kavanaugh described. The implication of the hypothetical is that the elderly man lives alone. LaPlante did not. Moreover, Gallagher and LaPlante were not out of touch or nonresponsive, as was the elder in Justice Kavanaugh's hypothetical. Pompeo and another elder care worker had seen LaPlante two days earlier ... and his appearance was not a cause for concern....

Further, even if Pompeo could see LaPlante on the couch [through a window], neither he nor Gallagher had any obligation to answer the door or respond to the knock. "When law enforcement officers who are not armed with a warrant knock on a door, they do no more than any private citizen might do. And whether the person who knocks on the door and requests the opportunity to speak is a police officer or a private citizen, the occupant has no obligation to open the door or to speak." Kentucky v. King (U.S. 2011). A jury could find that Gallagher's lack of response to a knock on the door when she was not expecting visitors, and her absence from the room in which LaPlante was sleeping, did not give rise to a reasonable belief by Pompeo that LaPlante was unattended and suffering an emergency.

In an age in which the public is increasingly skeptical of police qualified immunity, the analysis is refreshing for taking seriously the doctrine's objective check on police perception. The likely failure of qualified immunity here leaves the state defendants vulnerable to the civil rights and tort claims on remand.

On the tort claims, the trial courts erred egregiously in dismissing for perceived want of injury. My first-semester, 1L Torts students can tell you that none of trespass, false imprisonment, nor battery requires physical injury, in the sense of impact. These intentional torts all balance a higher culpability state with a lower injury threshold. The lower threshold rests upon the theory that tort objectives such as preserving the peace and averting vigilantism justify recognition of insults to personal integrity or honor, even in the absence of physical or pecuniary loss. The notion is as old as the Roman law of iniuria.

As to trespass, the Appeals Court opined, quoting Massachusetts high court precedents, "It has long been the 'general rule' in this Commonwealth that 'possession of real estate is sufficient to enable the parties in possession to maintain an action against a stranger for interfering with that possession.' Proof of injury is not required; 'the action is founded merely on the possession.'"

Similarly, false imprisonment is accomplished by the plaintiff's awareness of confinement, and battery by an "offensive," that is, non-consensual nor justified-by-social-contract, touching of the plaintiff. In false imprisonment, "[i]t is enough if a person's personal liberty is restrained," the Appeals Court opined. And even if the elder man, not legally competent at the time, "was not aware of his confinement, Gallagher, his proxy, was." The court further relied on, while expressly not adopting, similar sentiments in the Second Restatement of Torts.

On each theory, the plaintiff is permitted to prove compensable loss above and beyond the minimal, prerequisite condition of injury. The caretaker alleged that the elder man in fact deteriorated physically while in hospital care, evidenced by an enlarged bedsore and diminished mobility. And the facts established to date indicate that the elder man had been subject to blood and urine testing in the hospital without the consent of the caretaker, his only proxy: a more-than-de-minimis, physical insult.

The same reasoning that unwound qualified immunity negated any defense of emergency on which the trial courts relied to dismiss the tort claims as a matter of law. And the hospital claimed no emergency over the elder man's five-day residency, such as would have justified failing to seek the caretaker's consent.

Finally, I was struck by a footnote the court dropped that speaks not only to the sad facts of this case, but to the broader context of our present, vigorous public policy discussion about the role of police in society and our infrastructure for social services, such as physical and mental healthcare. The court lamented:

[The eldercare agent who precipitated investigation and police involvement,] Bessette[,] and Gallagher were strangers to one another. Perhaps if Bessette had agreed to assist Gallagher by sitting with LaPlante for an hour while Gallagher did grocery shopping, she could have accomplished her investigatory purpose—allowing her to speak with LaPlante alone— and we might not have a case at all. Pasqualone v. Gately (Mass. 1996) (if officer had asked gun owner to voluntarily turn over his weapons after his license was revoked rather than demand them with considerable show of force, we might have a different case).

Recently, my wife and I read in the New York Times Magazine about the "viral nightmare" that exploded at Arizona State University from students' feud over the "multicultural safe space," fueled in no small part by the university's hyper-formalist response.

"If only someone had sat them down and made them listen to each other ... ," my wife sighed.

The instant case is Gallagher v. South Shore Hospital, Inc., No. 21-P-207 (Mass. App. Ct. Oct. 6, 2022) (temporary posting). Justice Vickie L. Henry wrote the opinion for a unanimous panel that also comprised Chief Justice Green and Justice Sullivan.

Accidental deaths on nonpublic stairways threaten public transit with tort liability in London, Boston

Canning Town Station in 2020
(photo by Ewan Munro CC BY-SA 2.0)

An English court last week exonerated the London Underground of liability in the death of a trespasser who fell down fire-escape stairs; meanwhile, in New England, investigation continues into the death of a Boston professor who fell from disused stairs in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) system.

The facts of the cases differ, but both point to the obligation of aging transit systems to secure their physical infrastructure, even against risks to trespassers.

Bernard Ovu, a 35-year-old IT specialist for the UK Bar Council, fell, hit his head, and died in 2017.  On a meandering journey on a bitter-cold night, Ovu was returning home from a wedding; a post mortem test reported his blood-alcohol level at 0.176%.  At about 2 a.m. at the Canning Town Station, Ovu went through an emergency exit door, where an emergency stair led to a second door to the street.  Surveillance showed that Ovu reached the street-level exit door, but, for unknown reasons, did not push it open.

An image in the Ovu opinion depicts Canning Town Station.
The triangle marks the platform exit; the square marks street
access. Ovu fell at the circle.

Meanwhile, responding to a silent alarm, an Underground worker had secured the platform-level door.  Evidence showed that Underground policy required workers to sweep the area before re-securing the door, but no sweep was done.  Underground officials knew the emergency way was accessed occasionally, especially in late-night hours, by persons seeking to urinate or vomit.  Ovu could not reenter the platform and apparently believed himself trapped.  Seeking another exit, he fell on the stairs at 2:49 a.m. and died, possibly as a result of the combination of his injuries, intoxication, and the below-freezing temperature.

A professor in the Boston University School of Public Health, David K. Jones also was in a place where he should not have been.  The 40-year-old was out for a Saturday morning run in September when he took a staircase down from an overpass near the JFK Station.  The staircase was rusted and missing six steps: a gap through which Jones fell 20 feet to his death.  The staircase had been closed for 20 months and was fenced off at top and bottom; it is unknown how or why Jones entered it.  The MBTA removed the stairway days after the accident.

With investigation continuing in the Jones accident, the MBTA system has since suffered a bloody escalator accident and a pedestrian near-miss with debris falling from a stairway.  Commentators have thus linked the state of the transit system with the national debate over infrastructure financing.

The court in the Ovu matter ruled that Ovu was a trespasser in the emergency way and that the Underground had conducted itself reasonably relative to that status.  Despite the Underground's derogation of policy, Ovu had arrived in his predicament through his own misfeasance, and he was not in fact trapped.  It remains unclear whether Jones knowingly passed through secure fencing; if he did, then he was a trespasser on the rusty stairway from which he fell.  If that was the case, then Massachusetts law would not preclude liability, but would afford less latitude to a plaintiff than UK law.

Historically, common law was unforgiving of trespass.  The web of rules that evolved for the problem of landowner liability for dangerous conditions varied the liability rule depending on the status of the injured person.  At its simplest, distinctions were drawn in the three categories of public invitees, social guests ("licensees"), and trespassers.  The latter were owed little in the way of landowner duty, at most to refrain from the intentional or reckless infliction of harm.

Common law complexity has gradually given way to a unitary "reasonableness" standard, under which the status of the plaintiff is referred to the jury as a circumstance for its consideration.  When the Washington Supreme Court chose to retain the common law framework in 1986, it observed that only nine states had moved to the unitary standard—as well as England, by statute.  Today, half of states have adopted the unitary standard, and it is favored by the Third Restatement of Torts.

But among unitary-standard states, trespassers are not necessarily incorporated, reflecting a continuing vitality in their common law disfavor.  States, including Massachusetts, exclude trespassers from the unitary standard by a ratio better than two to one.  After some wrangling in the case law, the UK by statute incorporated trespassers into the unitary standard.

Thus, Ovu, even as a trespasser, was owed a duty of reasonable care.  A Massachusetts trespasser can prevail only upon proof of reckless or intentional wrongdoing.  If the estate and family of Jones seek liability from the MBTA, they will be far better off if the investigation uncovers a defect in how the stairway was secured.  If Jones made an innocent mistake of fact, then plaintiffs might hope to challenge his status as a trespasser and move him to within the unitary reasonableness standard.  That uncertainty might explain why there has not yet been report of a lawsuit in the Jones matter, while the Sept. 26 escalator accident yielded a suit by the first of October.

It happens that the Massachusetts Appeals Court heard a case about just such a mistake of fact in 2016.  In Bernier v. Smitty's Sports Pub, Inc., a pub patron in his 70s, Ronald Leger, was killed when he fell down a dark basement stairwell with uneven steps.  Leger mistook a door marked "Employees Only" for the entrance to the men's room.  He had been drinking, but had been to the pub and used the restroom before.  The door usually was locked, and there was no evidence that a patron had made the same mistake before.

The trial court in Bernier ruled Leger not a trespasser.  The adequacy of the marking on the unlocked door, at the pertinent time at which Leger stood before it, was incorporated into the question of negligence for the jury's consideration.  The jury awarded the plaintiffs 80% recovery after reduction for Leger's own negligence in making the mistake.

On appeal, the court affirmed.  The status of a visitor on land, trespasser or otherwise, was properly a question of law for the trial court, the Appeals Court opined.  The jury verdict was sufficiently supported by the evidence.  One could imagine a similar analysis in the Jones matter.

The English case is Ovu v. London Underground (Q.B. Oct. 13, 2021).  Master Victoria McCloud authored the opinion.  HT @ Gordon Exall, Civil Litigation Brief, via Private Law Theory.  Wells, Anderson, & Race, LLC, Denver, Colo., prepared a 50-state survey of landowner liability regimes in the United States in 2015 for the National Association of Minority & Women Owned Law Firms.

Tenth Circuit affirms injunction of Kansas ag gag law

My dog Rocky (2001-2019) at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas, 2009
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Animal Legal Defense Fund has prevailed in an ag gag case in the Tenth Circuit, a three-judge panel upholding permanent injunction of the Kansas law.

I wrote recently about ag gag in the Eighth Circuit, where the court sustained a criminal prohibition on entering agricultural facilities on false pretenses.

The Kansas law was impermissibly viewpoint discriminatory, the Tenth Circuit panel held, in its requirement that the offender bear "intent to damage the enterprise conducted at the animal facility."  Because the law criminalized conduct exclusively with reference to the protected expression that would follow from entrance and recording on agricultural property, the court rejected the government's argument on appeal that the statute criminalized only conduct, not speech.

In dissent, U.S. Circuit Judge Harris Hartz—a member of the Judicial Education Advisory Board at the George Mason Law and Economics Center, participant in the Third Restatement of Agency, and once an academic—opined that merely retrenching the statutory definition to intentional deception would render the statute constitutional.  Judge Hartz and the majority found themselves in an R.A.V.-Wisconsin v. Mitchell tug of war, familiar to First Amendment scholars and law students, over whether the statutory intent requirement merely described mens rea or constituted impermissible viewpoint discrimination.

The dissent demonstrates what I wrote last week, that ag gag laws typically fail for overreach, but can be drafted constitutionally, thus, the mixed outcome in the Eighth Circuit.

The case is ALDF v. Kelly, No. 20-3082 (10th Cir. Aug. 19, 2021).  U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn McHugh affirmed in the majority opinion, which was joined by her fellow Utahn Senior Judge Michael Murphy. Labor organizations, law professors, and a profusion of media organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Kansas press and sunshine advocates, lined up as amici against the Kansas law.

'What is truth?': 8th Circuit wrangles over ag gag

The Eighth Circuit reached mixed outcomes yesterday in First Amendment review of the Iowa "ag gag" law, upholding a criminal prohibition on entering agricultural production facilities under false pretenses.

Sausage packing in Chicago, 1893

"Ag gag" refers to laws designed to deter undercover investigative reporting on the agricultural industry, especially by criminalization. On the one side, journalists, public health advocates, and animal rights activists point to a tradition of undercover reporting dating to the Upton Sinclair muckraking classic The Jungle (1906), which exposed labor exploitation in the meat industry.

Journalist and professor Brooke Kroeger—who filed an amicus with the Eighth Circuit in the instant case—in her book Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012), actually traces the tradition farther back, to reporting on slavery and human trafficking in the 19th century.  For a more recent entry in the genre, check out Michael Holtz's fascinating pandemic-era report, in last month's Atlantic, from inside a Kansas slaughterhouse.

On the other side, private business and advocates for private property rights point to the simple proposition that falsehood is impermissible in commerce and should not be permitted to facilitate trespass and undermine (markedly unidirectional) employee loyalty.

Insofar as the problem boils down to the criminalization of falsity, a fuzziness surfaces in First Amendment fundamentals.  The U.S. Supreme Court has long recited competing mantras on the permissibility of state regulation of falsity.  For example, commercial speech doctrine cuts a wide berth for the regulation of false and misleading expression, allowing free speech and consumer protection law to coexist upon the premise that falsity has no social value.  At the same time, First Amendment doctrine in areas such as defamation law, animated by the Miltonian-Millian philosophy of liberty, tells us that a free marketplace of ideas must allow for the expression of falsity so that truth can be tested and revealed.

The Court tackled this dichotomy in United States v. Alvarez in 2012, striking down part of the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which criminalized misrepresentation of military honors.  But the Court fractured on rationale.  The plurality applied First Amendment strict scrutiny, and a concurrence would have applied intermediate scrutiny.  No one challenged the negligible scrutiny that abides criminalization of falsity in perjury, for example.  The distinction that upped the ante in Alvarez was the statute's "sweeping, quite unprecedented reach," regardless of context, regardless of motive.  Whereas a perjury prohibition plainly protects the integrity of the judicial process, the Stolen Valor Act pertained "to a false statement made at any time, in any place, to any person," for any reason.

And it was on that distinction that the Eighth Circuit perceived a difference in two provisions of the Iowa ag gag law.  One provision the court, affirming the district court, struck down, concerning the criminalization of false statements on an employment application.  The Iowa legislature, like Congress in Alvarez, overreached.

The proscription of the Employment Provision does not require that false statements made as part of an employment application be material to the employment decision.... [The statute] allows for prosecution of those who make false statements that are not capable of influencing an offer of employment. Plausible scenarios abound: the applicant falsely professes to maintain a wardrobe like the interviewer’s, exaggerates her exercise routine, or inflates his past attendance at the hometown football stadium.

The court reached a different conclusion on the provision prohibiting access to agricultural production facilities upon false pretenses.  That implication of falsity was sufficiently linked to "a legally cognizable harm—namely, trespass to private property"—that the court placed the provision beyond First Amendment review, distinguishing the ag gag law from the Stolen Valor Act.  "The better rule in light of Alvarez is that intentionally false speech undertaken to accomplish a legally cognizable harm may be proscribed without violating the First Amendment."

The opinion has a bit of candy for tortheads, too, in reasoning that even trespass warranting only nominal damages is "a legally cognizable harm."  "Trespass is an ancient cause of action that is long recognized in this country. See United States v. Jones [U.S. 2012]; 3 William Blackstone, Commentaries  ... ," the court began.

[The district] court’s own citation to Black’s Law Dictionary acknowledged that nominal damages are "awarded when a legal injury is suffered but there is no substantial loss or injury to be compensated." Damages, Black’s Law Dictionary (10th ed. 2014) (emphasis added). Nominal damages are not "purely symbolic, a mere judicial token that provides no actual benefit to the plaintiff." Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski [U.S. 2021]. They are, rather, damages paid to a plaintiff that provide redress for an injury. Id.... Even without physical damage to property arising from a trespass, these damages may compensate a property owner for a diminution of privacy and a violation of the right to exclude—legally cognizable harms. See ALDF v. Wasden ... (9th Cir. 2018) (Bea, J., dissenting in part and concurring in part); see also Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid [U.S. 2021] ("The right to exclude is one of the most treasured rights of property ownership.")....

The complainant in the Iowa case is the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), which has litigated and is litigating ag gag challenges throughout the country.  (I'm faculty adviser for the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund at UMass Law.)

The first time I testified in a legislative hearing, in my first year of teaching in 1998, I spoke, at the invitation of the Society of Professional Journalists, against an Arkansas ag gag bill.  The bill died in committee.  In the 1990s, an earlier generation of ag gag laws targeted speech about Big Ag as a form of civil or criminal defamation.  That approach was especially vulnerable to First Amendment challenge.

Food Lion Kings Mountain, N.C.
(Mike Kalasnik CC BY-SA 2.0)

At the same time, in the 1990s, the Food Lion case against ABC News, over undercover reporting on food mishandling, was playing out in the courts.  By decade's end, Food Lion prevailed against the ABC defendants for trespass and breach of the employee duty of loyalty, but not for defamation or fraud.  Big Ag learned to reframe ag gag to focus on conduct, rather than speech.  The next generation of ag gag laws aimed to protect private property against trespass, feigning ignorance of First Amendment implications.

Presently, the ALDF is fighting a broad Arkansas ag gag law, in the property-protective vein, enacted in 2017.  On Monday, the day before the Iowa opinion was announced, the Eighth Circuit revived and remanded the ALDF suit in Arkansas.  The district court had dismissed upon an erroneous understanding of First Amendment standing.  The Arkansas law is a model of special interest legislation enacted at the behest of Big Ag power-player Vaught Farms.

The Eighth Circuit opinions in both the Iowa case and the Arkansas case were authored by Judge Steven Colloton, an Iowan.  Judge Colloton had different co-panelists in each case, and both panels generated a dissent.  In the Iowa case, Judge Raymond Gruender, a Missourian reportedly short-listed by President Trump for the Supreme Court, would have upheld the Iowa law in both provisions.  In the Arkansas case, Judge Bobby Shepherd, an Arkansan criticized for upholding Missouri anti-abortion laws to set up a challenge to Roe v. Wade, tracked the erroneous reasoning of the district court on standing.

I find worth quoting a short concurrence in the Iowa case.  Judge L. Steven Grasz, a Nebraskan, hints at the relationship between ag gag and the bigger First Amendment picture of our contemporary misinformation crisis.

This nation was founded on the concept of objective truth ("We hold these truths to be self-evident...."). And some of our nation's oldest institutions were founded as instrumentalities of the search for truth (Veritas). The quest for truth has not, of course, ended; nor has the clash between the free flow of ideas and the desire to punish untruthful speech that is perceived as harmful. The law has long provided for legal consequences for false speech constituting fraud, perjury, and defamation. The present case, however, presents a new category of deceit which the State of Iowa seeks to penalize. Some see it as investigative journalism. Others see it as lying to further an agenda at the expense of private property rights. In either sense, its punishment presents a legal dilemma between protecting property and protecting speech. While some have always questioned whether truth can be known ("What is truth?"), our task is not to answer that question but simply to determine whether the constitution allows the government to criminally punish falsity in the specific context of the statute before us.

I join the court's opinion in full because I believe it is consistent with current law, as best we can determine it from limited and sometimes hazy precedent. Still, I do so hesitantly as to the Access Provision. The court's opinion today represents the first time any circuit court has upheld such a provision. At a time in history when a cloud of censorship appears to be descending, along with palpable public fear of being "cancelled" for holding "incorrect" views, it concerns me to see a new category of speech which the government can punish through criminal prosecution. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to determine whether such laws can be sustained, or whether they infringe on the "breathing room" necessary to effectuate the promise of the First Amendment.

Going forward, a key question will be whether access-by-deceit statutes will be applied to punish speech that has instrumental value or which is tied to political or ideological messages....

In general, public interest constitutional litigation against state ag gag has fared very, very well in the courts.  So the Eighth Circuit distinction on the Iowa access provision bucks the trend, which is not to say the court was mistaken.  To my mind, most of the victories against ag gag, as in the Iowa case, have derived from legislative overreach.  As I told the Arkansas committee in 1998, it is possible to draft an "ag gag" bill that would pass constitutional muster.  But such a statute would substantially duplicate the existing tort law of trespass, fraud, and product disparagement.  And while common law tort accommodates constitutional norms by design, rigid statutes are more prone to invite expensive legal challenge in the application.

The real problem, politically for Big Ag, is that it wants more than tort law gives, or than constitutional law permits.  And for public interest advocates, the problem ultimately is one of policy, not constitutional law.  Legislators must be motivated to choose accountability over campaign donations, and the public must be motivated to care about labor conditions and animal welfare, even when opacity precludes investigation.

These cases also resonate in the vein of transparency and access in the private sector.  As I have written previously, contemporary social and economic woes increasingly arise from private-sector abuse of public trust, and our cramped notion of state action is critically diminishing democratic accountability.

The Iowa case is Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Reynolds, No. 19-1364 (8th Cir. Aug. 10, 2021).  The Arkansas case is Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Vaught, No. 20-1538 (8th Cir. Aug. 9, 2021).

Best friend of teen struck, killed by train may claim negligence without physical injury, appeals court rules

On a "zone of danger" theory, the Massachusetts Appeals Court last week reinstated the claim of negligent infliction of emotional distress by the teenage best friend of a girl struck and killed by an MBTA commuter train in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Fence gap in NECN coverage, Oct. 31, 2014.  More from WCVB below.
Be warned, video surveillance captured girls' screams. 

Thirteen-year-old best friends Kiandra Calderon and Jenaira Fuentes were crossing rail tracks in between their homes and shops, where they bought Halloween costumes.  The court recounted, "For most, if not all, of the ten years during which the defendant [Royal Park, LLC] has owned the property, there have been large holes and gaps in the fence through which adults and children pass on a daily basis in order to reach nearby shopping plazas and the Lawrence High School." On Halloween 2014,Jenaira was struck and killed by an MBTA train.  "Kiandra, who was not struck by the train, tried to perform life saving measures on her friend and then remained close by as rescue personnel unsuccessfully tried to save Jenaira's life."

Kiandra sued on two counts, first, for negligence under the Massachusetts child trespasser statute, and second, for negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED).  The court recognized that the two claims were essentially the same, because the trespasser statute provided the standard of care for the NIED, and the NIED provided the alleged injury required by the trespasser statute.  According to the pleadings, Kiandra's suffering was so severe that it manifested physically, as NIED claims typically require at minimum, requiring medical treatment for "anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, night terrors, nightmares, diminished appetite and food intake, bouts of extreme anger, behavioral problems at home and school, poor educational performance, and self-harm."

Even so, NIED claims are typically disallowed in the United States.  Negligence, or foreseeable accident, is regarded as too thin a reed on which to hold a defendant responsible for the merely emotional suffering of another, in the absence of physical injury.  Imagine if every romantic breakup resulted in an NIED lawsuit.  Whatever tort reformers or foreign observers might think, the United States isn't that lawsuit crazy.

There are exceptions, though, to the no-NIED rule.  Massachusetts is among the states that have kept the door open for the occasional compelling theory of NIED, not rejecting the notion outright.  And there are exceptions that are widely accepted.  Courts throughout the states are willing to award NIED recoveries to plaintiffs who were in the "zone of danger" themselves, even if narrowly escaping physical injury, reasoning that the physical threat was sufficient to make emotional distress claims credible and verifiable.  A smaller number of states are willing to award NIED recoveries to a narrow class of bystanders, those who contemporaneously witness physical injury inflicted on a close family member.

Kiandra's counsel tried to bring her within the bystander category by pleading the closeness of the teens' best friendship; the trial court was not moved.  However, the Appeals Court held, the trial court failed to consider Kiandra's own position in the zone of danger.  The girls were walking the tracks together, and just one was struck and killed.  Pending further development of the facts, it looks like Kiandra was in much the same jeopardy as her friend (see the WCVB video above, but be warned, the audio tough to hear).  The court sharply distinguished bystander NIED recovery from zone-of-danger recovery.  In the latter case, the plaintiff is a direct victim of the defendant's negligence, not an indirect sufferer as witness, and need not prove a close family relationship.  The court reversed and remanded for Kiandra to pursue her day in court.

The case is Calderon v. Royal Park, LLC, No. 18-P-1014 (Mass. App. Ct. Sept. 10, 2019).  Vuono, Wolohojian, and McDonough, JJ., were on the panel.

Nuisance rule for trees rooted in history, reaffirmed by Mass. high court

In an opinion suitable for textbooks, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reaffirmed the rule of nuisance that neighbor may not sue neighbor over property damage from a healthy, overhanging tree.

A resident of Randolph, Massachusetts, complained that a neighbor's overhanging tree, a 100-foot sugar oak, had caused property damage by promoting algae on the complainant's roof.  The high court reiterated the historic rule that a property owner cannot be held liable in nuisance for damage caused by a neighbor's healthy tree, whether unruly roots that damage a foundation, or the natural shedding of leaves, branches, and sap.  A neighbor is entitled to trim back offending incursions, the court observed.

The court reaffirmed the historic rule despite the complainant's entreaty to consider alternative approaches from other states.  The rule emerged from a time of lower population density, when it would have been excessively burdensome for property owners to monitor all trees near property lines, the court explained.  "We invite challenge to antiquated laws," the court wrote.  Nevertheless, the court declined to "uproot precedent."  The historic rule continues to have relevance by minimizing litigation, the court reasoned, especially when the law is clear that a neighbor may cut back overhanging branches.

Affirming the lower court, the case is Shiel v. Rowell, No. SJC-12432 (Mass. July 16, 2018) (Cypher, J.).