ROANOKE TIMES:
State's Supreme Court declines to
rehear Virginia Tech shooting case
The court had earlier overturned a
jury award to families of two slain students.
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Posted: Tuesday, January 21, 2014
1:08 pm
Posted on January
21, 2014
•
by Tonia Moxley
•
On
Tuesday the Supreme Court of Virginia refused to reconsider whether Virginia
Tech officials, and therefore the state, were negligent in handling the April
16, 2007, campus shootings, according to an attorney in the case.
The
ruling ends the case in the state court system.
Plaintiff’s
attorney Bob Hall issued a statement on behalf of the families of slain
students Julia Pryde and Erin Peterson, which read in part: “This case should
not have ended this way.”
On
Halloween, seven of the court’s justices overturned a combined $8 million jury
award for the plaintiffs that was handed down by a Montgomery County Circuit
Court jury in 2012. The plaintiffs then filed a petition asking the high court
to reconsider its ruling.
On
Tuesday, the court denied the request in an order, Hall wrote in an email. The
order had not yet been entered on the Supreme Court’s website Tuesday.
The
high court’s ruling was a disappointment to the families, following the 2012
victory that they said vindicated their fight on behalf of their daughters.
In
March of that year, the circuit court jury ruled that Tech officials were
negligent for failing to warn the campus of a shooter on the loose after a
fatal early morning shooting in a West Ambler Johnston dormitory room on April
16. Less than three hours later, the same shooter chained shut the doors of
Norris Hall and opened fire in second floor classrooms.
An
email sent minutes before shots were fired in Norris notified the campus of a
“shooting incident,” but assured recipients that police perceived no ongoing threat.
In
all, 33 people — including shooter Seung-Hui Cho and Peterson and Pryde — died.
More than a dozen other people were injured. The tragedy remains the
highest-casualty school shooting in U.S. history.
The
multi-million dollar jury award was reduced last year by the lower court to a
combined $200,000 under a Virginia law that caps damages against the state.
Still, the Peterson and Pryde families said at the time that the jury’s finding
of negligence was most important to them.
But
the state appealed, asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the jury’s
verdict. The appeal alleged that the presiding judge in the case made a handful
of erroneous rulings during the trial.
The
Supreme Court sided with the defense, saying that Tech officials had no duty
under Virginia law to warn Peterson and Pryde of potential third-party criminal
acts.
Furthermore,
even if a duty to warn had existed, the plaintiffs did not present sufficient
evidence to prove their case, the court ruled.
Hall
wrote Tuesday that in overturning the verdict, the high court disregarded
“well-established principles of appellate review” that entitled the plaintiffs
to “have the evidence, and all inferences that might be reasonably drawn from
it, viewed in the light most favorable to them.”
“Instead
the Court viewed the evidence in the light most favorable to the losing party
at trial, made no mention of or citation to significant Plaintiff’s evidence
which was contrary to the view the Court took, and ultimately decided the case
on the basis that ‘available information after the first shootings indicated
the shooter had fled the scene and posed no danger to the campus,’ ” Hall
wrote.
“But,
there was no such information. That was a fiction floated by the university to
deflect attention away from its failure to warn the campus. It had no factual
support, but that didn’t keep the Court from making it a center piece of its
decision to set aside the verdicts,” Hall wrote.
Tech
spokesman Larry Hincker reiterated Tuesday that university officials are
pleased with the high court’s rulings.
In
a prepared statement released in November, Hincker added that the court’s
“actions can never reverse the loss of lives nor the pain experienced by so
many families and friends of victims of one person. In the end, the cause of
these heinous acts and continuing heartbreak was a troubled and angry young man
with easy access to powerful killing weapons.”
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