Nature punishes stupidity, the city pays
Two brothers have been awarded an astronomical sum from New York City in a Brooklyn court for being total idiots:
The two brothers, Virgil Brown, then 26, and John Brown, then 27, dived off a 700-foot-long, city-owned fishing pier that juts out from the boardwalk of the famous seaside attraction. They had to scale a 3-foot, wooden-slat fence to do it and look down at the shallow water about 10 feet below the pier.
”I was cooling off. It was very hot that day,” Virgil Brown, a construction worker before the accident, recalled recently.
Now 38, he said he couldn’t tell from his perch that the water was only a few feet deep. He broke his neck when his head slammed into the sand.
His brother, John, dived in to try to help and suffered a similar injury.
New York City taxpayers had to pay because the jury decided that the city, which installed the fence, was responsible for the accident, despite what the city claimed was the bad judgment of the two men.
So, for doing something that was entirely their own fault, a jury awarded the now quadriplegic brothers more than $104 million, later reduced to $25 million, that taxpayers have to cover.
I can understand that jury members feel sorry for the guys so harshly punished for their own stupidity, but it just shows how irresponsible and generous juries can be with other people's money that they gave them the insane amount for something that was entirely their fault and no wrongdoing of the city.
The key fault of the city, the court ruled, was not posting “no diving” signs. That warning is now stenciled every few feet along the fence.
Are there "no jumping" signs on the Empire State Building?
Attempts to introduce laws to reduce such rewards have been met with little support in the legislatures. Well, how many of the elected representatives are lawyers?
2:32:04 AM 
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