Hartford, Connecticut

A couple of things to say about the 78 year old victim of the hit and run who is ignored by onlookers. First, read the whole article and then watch the whole video on full screen mode.

Now my comments are in no particular order:

1. Hartford: World capital of insurance companies. "Its no problem, that guy is insured."

2. The police show up in 185 seconds. Pretty good first response.

3. Those video cameras all over Hartford are tax dollars at work.

4. Watch the victim getting hit very carefully: there is some kind of car chase happening. One car is chasing another, both swerve into the wrong lane of traffic and both speed around the corner and too the right. I'll come back to that.

5. Distrust my comment on #1. Yeah it looks bad when the video is small and grainy but when you look full screen you see the whole story. The lady who comes out from the street looks at the guy on the ground then walks away. She comes back later, out of the store, and is pointing at the guy. The guy who looks like he is holding his blazer and is walking away as he gets dropped off. That's not what happens. He comes off the sidewalk from the other side, stops a car going the other way, points at the victim, then continues crossing the street to get help.

6. The general tort rule: there is no duty to help someone who is hurt or in danger. Exception to the general rule, in torts, is that if you created the hazard then you have a duty to help. Exceptions can also arise outside of a common law torts context: certain types of care professionals have a special duty (special means particular) to give aid. Where there is that sort of special duty associated with a profession, there is normally a matching limit on liablity to the aid giver. In any case, many jurisdictions have "good samaratian" laws to protect the aid giver against liability. No jurisdictions have created a general statutory duty to reverse the general tort rule, although the last episode of Seinfield is essentially a hypothetical example of what would happen if there was one. I think that the setting for that episode was Hartford, Conn.

7. The victim of the hit and run was jaywalking. This is "mallum prohibitum" and is probably, therefore, strict liablity: if all the elements of his act and not all the elements of an exception are met, then he will get a fine irrespective of a culpable mental state (or mens rea)

8. Battery, in contrast, is mallum in se. Criminal battery is the nonconsensual, harmful touching, of another, with the intent to harm. Nonconsensual includes where consent is rendered invalid like through fraud, infancy, or incompetence of the victim. There is a general presumption against consent to be battered. Here, the fact that the victim was jaywalking should not be construed as consent. A similiar sounding (but actually different) analysis is that by jaywalking the victim accepted the risk. Acceptance of the risk is a doctrine of civil tort law that exposes a person to reasonably foreseeable risks. Normally its a defense against negligence or accident and it comes up in the context of, for example, baseball fields which have properly put up a protective barrier behind home plate: If you don't want to get hit by foul balls, sit behind the fence, otherwise you are accepting the risk of being hit by a foul ball, but you cannot accept the risk of being battered by a ball intentionally thrown at you. Back to the hit and run victim, jaywalking my excuse certain types of tortious negligence at common law, can't excuse criminal battery and likely won't excuse a violation of connecticut's rules of the road. Next, the harmful touching in a battery can be done with an implement. Here that impliment seems to be a car.

9. Back to the car chase. Let's say for a moment that the driver of the hit and run had robbed a back and the person who got hit dies. This will invoke the felony murder rule. The felony murder rule says that the requisite intent for a homicide to be murder is fulfilled if the victim's death was either in furtherance of the crime or a reasonably forseeable outcome of the risk created by the criminal act. Here, a high-speed getaway from a robbery is sufficiently risky such that death of pedastrians is a foreseeable outcome. The perpatrator can be charged with felony murder.