Odd twist in city bid to cut $45M verdict
The city is asking an appeals court to lower a jury reward of $45 million to an Upper West Side woman — even though Gotham wasn’t part of the lawsuit — because officials fear the payday sets a precedent that could sink cash-strapped municipal agencies deeper into red ink.
The city’s Law Department, the New York City Housing Authority, and the New York City Transit Authority are asking judges from Manhattan’s Appellate Division to reduce the amount awarded to philanthropist Marion Hedges, who suffered severe brain injuries in October 2011 when she was struck by a shopping cart thrown from a 79-foot-high garage level at the East River Plaza mall in East Harlem.
Hedges, 55, won the record-setting award in 2018. The trial-court judge slashed the amount in half but the injured mom of two is still battling insurance companies for the mall and its security firm for payment.
No public entities are party to the case, but the city’s legal minds fear the eight-figure award would set a dangerous precedent, driving up future legal costs in lawsuits against the city and transit authority, government lawyers argue.
“The court’s vigilance needed now more than ever,” Devin Slack, assistant corporation counsel for Mayor de Blasio’s Law Department, wrote to a panel of appeals court judges.
“State and local governments across the country face unprecedented fiscal crises and are making deep cuts to public services, from education and health care,” he says in the recent brief.
The COVID-19 shutdown deprived the city of at least $9 billion in revenue.
But Hedges’ attorney, Thomas Moore, didn’t see the connection.
“Why should the city and the MTA, by pointing out their unquestionably difficult circumstances as a result of COVID, deprive this one plaintiff of her justice and her day in court after seven years?” he told The Post.
MTA lawyer Lawrence Heisler has an answer:
“The MTA is in the midst of a once-in-100-years fiscal tsunami that has demolished 40 percent of our revenue,” Heisler writes, noting that it faces a $16 billion deficit through 2024 with ridership at less than 30 percent of pre-coronavirus levels.
“That new reality demands that courts condemn ‘anchoring,’ the practice of counsel asking the jury to return an unjustifiably high award,” he argued. “That practice yields results, seducing juries into delivering awards that differ wildly from reasonable compensation.”
The MTA’s own personalinjury payouts have skyrocketed from just $43 million in 2007 to $150 million in 2019.
“Many of the individual payouts are a direct result of the anchoring tactics that warp the deliberations of lay jurors,” Heisler writes.
The city and NYCHA’s litigation costs are similarly burdensome. The Big Apple faces about 17,000 new personal-injury cases annually that result in average compensation of $100,000 each. That amount has quadrupled over the past seven years.