MountainBear,
Originally Posted by PBL
I would be very surprised to find that under (various state versions of) US law, there is no such duty.
Originally Posted by MountainBear
How does it feel to be surprised this morning? Hopefully it's a good feeling.
A rhetorically slick comment, but unnecessarily rude and also misleading.
I think you'll find that in many jurisdictions a general duty of care also extends to individuals. If A is employed by a security firm and carries a firearm when on the job, and he decides to show it off to a group of schoolkids taunting him, and he shoots one or two of them, then his employer may well have failed in its duty of care, but are you really suggesting that he walks off scot-free on the basis that he was in employment at the time of the incident? I doubt very much that he could. In many or most states, he would likely be prosecuted, and prosecutors would likely try to establish negligence (assuming no one believes the shooting was deliberate). Negligence is intimately bound with the concept of duty of care, for negligence is breach of that duty.
See, for example, the definition of "criminally negligent homicide" in Tennessee law, at
T.P.I. -- CRIM. 7.07
Note in particular the words "standard of care" in:
failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances
Safety Concerns,
Originally Posted by Safety Concerns
To suggest a company is responsible for the actions of an individual who knowingly and irresponsibly ignored approved procedures is nonsense.
Far from being nonsense, it is, as MountainBear pointed out, part of the law in most or all US states. A company is liable for the actions of any of its employees acting generally within the remit of their employment. Indeed, if you search for "duty of care" in US law documents on-line, these are the majority of instances you will find.
wings folded,
I am not sure what point you are trying to make by distinguishing a "tribunal correctionnel" from a "cour d'assise". Apparently, this tribunal correctionnel was able to hand down criminal sentences as well as apportion responsibility, and I think that discussion here is concerned mostly with a distinction between criminal act, whereby one is set some kind of punitive sentence for committing the act (often fine or prison), and civil liability, which is concerned mostly with financial compensation to victims for the consequences of an act. The distinction is clear and valid. One person was indeed handed a punitive sentence, in other words was judged guilty of a criminal offence. And it is the appropriateness of that in the context of larger concerns about improving aviation safety with which much of the discussion is concerned.
PBL