@cttc:
No, she didn’t, but a jury very well might have decided to give her a retirement gift, it does happen, people see someone who is horribly disfigured, who something bad has happened, and the jury wants to make it right.
It all depends on the jury, the one I was on in this case was a pretty well educated bunch, we had researchers and such from the pharm industry, people who understood things like physics (for example, the car that was run into had something like 200 bucks in damage…which right there indicates a low speed collision (not to mention the circumstances, going from a dead stop at a red light in a buick regal…). In all fairness to juries, the law doesn’t help much. We were told that both sides had agreed to one of the injuries, so we had to try and come up with a number (there was no asked for settlement) basically out of thin air, in these cases apparently they leave it up to the jury. We did it based on the complaints of the plaintiff, that she couldn’t for example clean the house easily, and tried to come up with a number representing a number of years of hiring someone to help. …so if juries do create magic numbers, well, it may be no one gives them guidelines either.
On the other hand, I was on another civil case years ago in NYC, where someone was suing a car company, arguing that their injuries were the result of negligence on the part of the car company, they weren’t wearing their seatbelt not were their passengers, got into an accident and got pretty banged up. They argued, despite the fact that NY state had seatbelt laws, despite the fact there was a warning light telling them it wasn’t on, and that they were going fast, that the car manufacturer should have done a better job making that car protect the passengers, despite the fact it met all applicable safety regulations. The plaintiff’s lawyer had experts who claimed the passengers even without seatbelts could have been better protected, they had (paid) experts saying that car’s chasis design wasn’t good enough compared to what other cars had (they used volvo and mercedes, which was ridiculous, the car in question was like a 1980’s Olds Cutlass Supreme or some such). The defense lawyer was good, pointed out the seat belts, pointed out that the car met safety standards, pointed out the speed the car was going for the street it was on, pointed out that Mercedes and Volvo were luxury cars well above the level of the Cutlass, also were heavier cars, and basically made a good case. We went to deliberate, and i can tell you that many people on that jury wanted to stick it to GM and the dealer that sold them the car, they saw the injuries (and they were bad), and wanted to help ‘the poor family’. I likely may have been the lone holdout…it ended up getting settled, I suspect because the defense attorney realized that they weren’t going to win.
I also made friends with a woman my wife and I used to commute to the city with, her husband was a lawyer in NY Supreme court and handled a lot of lawsuits, especially suits against NYC, and she said that that kind of thing happened routinely, that the juries would compensate based on feeling bad for the plaintiff. It is also true that judges routinely would cut the awards significantly, but juries are and can be swayed by emotion. Put it this way, if juries were not so swayed by emotion, lawyers would not spend so much time on jury selection, vetting jurors, they do so by profiles based on who they think certain people from certain backgrounds will act as jurors. As a young, educated person, I was often thrown off panels because I was considered by the prosecutor to be too liberal, as an old fart I tend to get thrown off by the defense, assuming I must be someone assuming someone was guilty until proven innocent…