Assessing The Factor Known As Contributory Negligence

It can prove difficult to assign any number or measurement to negligence. Yet that is exactly what a judge needs to do in a courtroom where the verdict in a personal injury case gets decided.

What is contributory negligence?

Careless or neglectful behavior qualifies as an example of negligence. It has contributed to a victim’s injury during an accident, if the injured victim was careless or neglectful. In other words, injury lawyer in Waterloo knows that victim’s actions failed to demonstrate the expected attention to caring for one’s own safety.

Contributory negligence has a target.

It gets directed towards a specific person. The target and the source of the careless and neglectful behavior are one and the same. Still, the target suffers further abuse, due to the effects of the negligent acts that were committed by another party.

Evidence of a victim’s self-abuse does not erase proof of the wrong actions taken by the other party.

That fact highlights the need for an assessment of contributory negligence. In a courtroom, the judge must assess and apportion the factors that contributed to any damages suffered by the victim. The judge must assume that minus the effects of the victim’s own actions, the other party’s actions would have been responsible for 100% of the damages.

In a courtroom, the defendant fills the role of the other party. The plaintiff fills the role of the victim. The judge and jury hear testimony concerning the nature of an accidental occurrence. Based on what they see and hear, the damage award must be reduced in a manner that matches with the degree of the plaintiff’s failure to exhibit duty-to-self.

What are some examples of failure to exhibit duty-to-self?

• Not wearing a seat belt in an automobile
• Not wearing a helmet, when riding a motorcycle
• Sending a text message while crossing the street.
• Failure to cross the street at a marked crossing point.
• Ignoring the instructions on a given medicine
• Exceeding the speed limit, while going around a curve on a road with a slight amount of traffic
• Driving a car at night, when you know that the one headlight does not work properly.
• Ignoring a stop sign, while talking on a cell phone
• Wearing dark-colored clothes at night; yet knowing that you must walk a good distance to get to your destination.
• Not paying a mechanic to check on the condition of a car’s brake
• Not putting chains in the car’s trunk, when heading for an elevated location during the winter months.
• Skating on thin ice
• Getting lured into vaping, in order to experience a new flavor
• Driving after using cannabis less than an hour earlier
• Driving after having taken some type of sleeping pill
• Driving while feeling “buzzed”