Court of Claims Holds State Liable for Prison Football Injury That Left Inmate Paralyzed

Published September 22, 2010 · Verdicts & Settlements

On Thanksgiving Day 2004, inmates at the Mansfield Correctional Camp organized a flag football game in the recreation yard. Prison rules allowed flag football and banned tackle. The corrections officer who was supposed to patrol the yard left after a few minutes. The game turned into tackle football, and about 45 minutes in, an inmate serving a one-year sentence collided with another player while trying to make a tackle. He has been a quadriplegic ever since.

Last week, on September 13, 2010, the Ohio Court of Claims entered its damages decision in that case. According to the court's decision, the state's total damages come to $8.65 million; because the court had earlier found the inmate half responsible for his own injury, the award was cut in half to $4.325 million, with an additional $80,000 awarded to his three minor children. Our office was not involved in the case. I am writing about it because it illustrates two things that most people in the Dayton area do not know: that the State of Ohio can be held liable for negligence, and how comparative fault works when it is.

How you sue the State of Ohio

You cannot sue the state in the Montgomery County Common Pleas Court. R.C. 2743.02(A)(1) is the statute in which Ohio gives up its sovereign immunity and consents to be sued, but only in a special court in Columbus called the Court of Claims. There is no jury; a judge decides both liability and damages. The statute says the state's liability is to be determined "in accordance with the same rules of law applicable to suits between private parties," with certain limitations spelled out in the chapter.

That last phrase is the important one. For most purposes, the state stands in the same shoes as a private business when its employees are careless. A prison that fails to supervise its yard is judged by the same negligence rules as a private company that fails to supervise a worksite.

What the Court of Claims found

The case was tried in two stages. In the liability trial, the court found that the state knew or should have known that a prohibited tackle game was underway and could have stopped it before the injury. The court rejected the state's argument that the inmate had assumed the risk of playing football as a complete defense. In the prison setting, the court reasoned, the state owed a duty of supervision that arose from the custodial relationship, and that duty is not erased simply because the activity was a sport.

The court did not let the inmate off the hook, either. It found that he failed to use due care for his own safety when he kept playing after the game turned to tackle, that his negligence was equal to the state's, and that his damages had to be reduced by 50 percent under R.C. 2315.33.

In the damages phase, the court itemized the loss: $4.5 million for lifetime care, $1.4 million for past and future lost wages (less $100,000 allocated to the children), $1.25 million for past and future pain and suffering, and $1.5 million for loss of enjoyment of life, for a total of $8.65 million before the comparative-fault reduction.

Why the fault reduction did not end the case

Readers of my post in July on Ohio's comparative negligence rule will recognize what happened here. Under R.C. 2315.33, a plaintiff's own fault bars recovery only if it is greater than the combined fault of everyone else. Fifty percent is not greater than fifty percent. So the inmate's recovery was reduced, not eliminated.

That distinction turned a zero into more than four million dollars. This is the point I make to clients every week: an insurer or a government lawyer who says "you were partly to blame, so you have no case" is wrong as a matter of Ohio law. The question is never whether you share blame. It is how much.

Why catastrophic-injury damages look the way they do

The damages breakdown in this decision is a useful illustration of how a serious-injury case is valued. Notice that the largest single number was not pain and suffering. It was $4.5 million for life care: the cost of attendants, equipment, medical treatment, and housing modifications that a quadriplegic will need for the rest of his life. Lost wages were next.

In a catastrophic case, the economic damages are built with experts: a life-care planner who prices every need year by year, and an economist who projects wages and reduces everything to present value. The pain-and-suffering and loss-of-enjoyment numbers come on top of that. A case like this cannot be presented well without that work, which is one reason a family facing a spinal-cord injury should get a lawyer involved early.

Claims against the government are different

Although the state is judged by private-party rules once it is in the Court of Claims, getting there and staying there involves its own set of traps:

• The wrong courthouse. Claims against the state go to the Court of Claims; claims against a city, county, township, or school district go to the local common pleas court under an entirely different immunity statute, R.C. Chapter 2744. Filing in the wrong place wastes time you may not have.
• Different deadlines. The Court of Claims has its own limitations period, and claims against political subdivisions have their own rules. Do not assume the usual two-year deadline applies.
• Immunity defenses. Political subdivisions and their employees have layered immunity protections that do not apply to private defendants. Earlier this year I wrote about an Ohio Supreme Court decision that limited one of those defenses for officers who act recklessly.
• No jury against the state. In the Court of Claims a judge decides everything, which changes how the evidence is presented.

The takeaway is not that government cases are hopeless. This decision shows the opposite. It is that they must be handled by someone who knows the procedure.

What this means for you

If you or a family member was seriously injured because a state agency, a state hospital, a state university, or a prison failed to do its job, you have a path to compensation, and comparative fault reduces that path rather than closing it. If the injury was fatal, the family's wrongful death claim follows the same route. Either way, the clock is short, the court is specialized, and the evidence of what the state knew and when it knew it is in the state's own records, which is why early investigation matters so much.