In my research, I came across a ruling that was particularly
disturbing (even disgusting) because it involved the sexual assault on a young
paperboy. With this ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court descended to new levels
of repugnance.
In May 1988, a 13-year-old boy and his parents agreed with
the Rockingham Publishing Company that the boy would deliver the company’s
newspapers in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Due to the boy’s age, under the Virginia
child labor laws, Rockingham could permit the boy and other carriers of the
same age only to distribute its “newspapers on regularly established routes between
the hours of four o’clock ante meridian (in the morning) and seven o’clock post
meridian (in the evening), excluding the time public schools are actually in
session.” A year and half after the then-13 year-old boy took over the route;
he was sexually assaulted one morning between six and six-thirty while
delivering papers.
There had been three previous pre-dawn assaults of a sexual
nature upon other young Rockingham carriers while they were delivering their
newspapers. While two of the assaults were more than two years before the one
in this legal action, one occurred only four months prior to the case in
question. Furthermore, all three of the earlier victims gave a similar
description of the young man who assaulted them.
In legal terms, the issue was whether Rockingham Publishing
had a special relationship with the plaintiff that would have required such a
warning, and whether the publishing company had enough prior evidence of sexual
assaults that it owed a duty to warn A.H. (the paperboy) and his parents. The
Virginia Supreme Court ruled that “Rockingham owed the same degree of care to
A.H. that “it would have owed if A.H. had been employed by Rockingham.” “And,
given the fact that Rockingham assigned a fixed route and time for A.H. to
distribute its newspapers, we conclude that the necessary special relationship
existed between Rockingham and A.H. with regard to the conduct of third
persons.”
Having said that, the Supreme Court then raised a
technicality that puts so many Virginians in a losing position when coming up
against private businesses. “Even though the necessary special relationship is
established with regard to a defendant’s potential duty to protect or warn a
plaintiff against the criminal conduct of a third party, that duty, as in other
cases of negligence cases, is not without limitations.” “A court must still
determine whether the danger of a plaintiff’s injury from such conduct was
known to the defendant or was reasonably foreseeable.”
Once you state that there are limitations, all you have to
do to protect private businesses is set the bar so high that it allows you to
reject evidence showing the attack was “reasonably
foreseeable.” Armed with this technicality, the court was then in position
to rule as follows: “Despite the special
relationship, and even though the plaintiff’s age may have imposed a greater
degree of care upon Rockingham than it would have owed an adult in the
plaintiff’s circumstances, Rockingham had no duty to warn or protect him
against harm unless the danger of an assault on the plaintiff was known or
reasonably foreseeable to Rockingham. Since Rockingham did not know that the
plaintiff was in danger of being assaulted on that particularly paper route, we
consider whether the evidence is sufficient to raise a jury question whether an
assault on him was reasonably foreseeable.”
The court, then, decided against the plaintiff’s claim that
his age and relationship to Rockingham created an additional duty of
disclosure, “because the plaintiff has not met his threshold obligation of
introducing evidence sufficient to create a jury issue on the question of
whether the assault was reasonably foreseeable.”
To the plaintiff’s charge that Rockingham gave “inadequate”
and “deceptive” warnings regarding the risks of assault upon its young carriers
while on their early morning deliveries did not meet the threshold to warrant a
more complete warning. The court said that even if the publishing firm’s safety
literature, video, and safety whistles were inadequate, that “did not rise to a
duty to give a more complete warning.”
There is something wrong with the court’s logic. If
Rockingham did not feel it had a responsibility, then why did it spend time,
money, and effort to have safety training for its paperboys in the first place?
Then the court said that even if Rockingham’s safety materials were deceptive
(a matter they did not decide) the court “did not think that a duty was created
in this case because neither the plaintiff nor his parent had seen or read any
of the safety literature.”
Two Virginia Supreme Court Justices—Justice Kinser and
Justice Lacey—concurred in part with the majority ruling and dissented in part
with the majority. The majority ruled, that because the three previous attacks
on paperboys had occurred in different locations, these attacks could not be
presented as evidence. The dissenting judges eloquently argued the opposite:
The random location of the assaults makes an attack on any given paper route,
more rather than less likely. “In other words, if the prior assaults had
occurred in only one area of the city or a particular route, then Rockingham
would be justified in arguing that it could not have foreseen that A.H.’s route
would have been the site of an assault.” The dissenting judges also pointed out
that the “fact that the assaults occurred in the same type of location, a paper
route… (rendered) an attack on A.H.’s route foreseeable.”
Other points raised in the dissenting opinion were modus
operandi of the prior assaults. This is a significant factor in whether or not
the attack was foreseeable. “…all prior attacks occurred in the pre-dawn hours
while the three victims were delivering Rockingham’s papers. … The victims also
gave strikingly similar descriptions of their assailant. All the descriptions
included the same attributes as the age, gender, race, and physique. In sum,
the time and method of the attacks, the sexual nature of the assaults, and the
similarity in the victims’ descriptions of the assailant are fact sufficient to
raise a jury question.”
“Finally,” the dissenting opinion said, “even though the
first two assaults occurred four-and-a-half years before the assault on A.H.,
Rockingham knew that the assailant in the first attacks was never apprehended.
Thus, when the third assault occurred four months before the assault on A.H.,
and the victim provided a description of the assailant remarkably similar to
those given by the first two victims, it was then reasonably foreseeable that
the danger to Rockingham’s carriers still existed.”
“For these reasons, I,” dissenting Judge Kinser wrote,
“would reverse the trial court’s judgment sustaining the motions to strike the
evidence and remand the case for a new trial.”
Editorial endorsements of papers such as those published by
the Rockingham Publishing Company are keys to the election of the Virginia
General Assembly, and the Assembly members elect the Supreme Court Judges.
There is no evidence of impropriety in the case of A.H. vs. Rockingham
Publishing Company, and I am not trying to accuse anyone of anything. But, the
Supreme Court of Virginia would have served the state’s citizens by bending
over backward to ensure that a jury heard the case.
I thought that the Rockingham Publishing decision was about
as low at the Court could go, but I was wrong. When I turn my attention to the
Virginia Tech massacre in future postings, I will examine the Virginia Supreme
Court’s overturning of the jury verdict in the Pryde and Peterson case against
the Virginia Tech—a decision that involved the Supreme Court’s introduction of
false evidence into its decision. In the Virginia Tech case, the court broke
the law by obstructing justice and denying the two families
their civil rights—their constitutional rights to a fair hearing in a
court of law. (To be continued)
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