| Venue: | CT SC |
| Facts: | Plaintiff, a meter reader, is raped by an unknown assailant. She sues the owner of the property where it happened, because there were some bushes that screened the incident from view. It was a bad neighborhood, there were crimes, and this shielded area was a nuisance, perhaps attracting the wrong element and making them bold to do things they otherwise would not. |
| Posture: | Verdict for the plaintiff at trial, $540K damages. Judge sets aside verdict on defendant's motion (no causation). Appeal. |
| Issue: | Can a landowner be liable to victims for crimes committed against them on the landowner's property behind brush and trees that shielded the area from public view? |
| Holding: | No. Affirmed. |
| Rule: | The harm suffered must be of the same general type as that which makes the defendant's conduct negligent in the first place. |
| Reasoning: | There's causation in fact, and there's legal causation (proximate
cause). The latter is always a question of how far the law
wants to look up the chain of causation. The test of proximate
cause is whether the defendant's conduct was a "substantial
factor." Determining that involves asking whether the harm
which occurred as of the same general nature as the foreseeable
risk created by the defendant's negligence.
Once you've put a plaintiff at risk, you are not relieved of responsibility merely because a third person was the cause in fact of the harm (unless the third person acted intentionally, and the nature of the harm was not within the scope of risk you created). This was clearly not a case of cause in fact. And the rapist clearly acted intentionally. And it seems farfetched that a prudent landowner would assume that overgrown vegetation would prompt criminal acts. |
| Dicta: | The testimony of the "environmental psychologist" is obviously expert testimony, not indicative of what a reasonable person should have known. |