Janno and the MTA are backing the car insurance scam but say they'd save a pittance and aren't sharing examples.
By Austin C. Jefferson and Gersh Kuntzman
Xavier Cuevas Ramirez and Arturo Marcelo Reyes were walking on Avenue H in Brooklyn on May 6, 2017, when a driver speeding through a stop sign in a friend’s Acura clipped an MTA bus before slamming into the two pedestrians at E. 52nd Street, causing $4 million in permanent injuries and pain and suffering for which they have yet to be compensated.
The jury in Ramirez-Reyes v. New York City Transit Authority determined that the driver, Jermaine Spence, was 92 percent responsible for the crash, while the MTA was held 8 percent liable.
Spence, then 21, didn’t have the cash — nor the kind of insurance — to cover his $3.7-million share of liability, so under state law, the MTA will likely end up paying all of the damages…
Still, an 8-percent liability shouldn’t force the MTA to pay out nearly $4 million in damages, should it? No, if you agree with Lieber, who scoffs at the single-digit liability. But yes, if you follow the law.
That 8 percent may sound small, but before arriving at that single-digit number, the jury first ruled that the MTA was “substantially” responsible for the crash. Indeed, before sending her jury into deliberations, Justice Caroline Cohen specifically lectured the panel on how to determine the MTA’s liability.
“There may be more than one cause of an accident [sic], but to be ‘substantial,’ it can’t be slight or trivial,” Cohen said, according to court records. “You may, however, decide that a cause is ‘substantial’ even if you assign it a relatively small percentage to it.”
So even an 8-percent liability determination reveals the MTA’s “substantial” role in the crash, said Joanne Doroshow, the executive director of the Center For Justice & Democracy at New York Law School.
“That’s the way it works,” she told Streetsblog.
She has little sympathy for the MTA’s position.
“If one of the entities can’t pay the other, the substantially responsible party should pay because otherwise the victim has to pay,” Doroshow said. “That was the intent of state lawmakers and the elder Cuomo in the 1980s.”
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