Trial News

In late April, Washington state Governor Jay Inslee signed into law a bill that greatly expands the availability of wrongful death and survival claims by allowing foreign parents and siblings of victims to bring state claims and eliminating certain dependency requirements. (S.B. 5163, 66th Leg. (Wash. 2019).) The law was passed in the wake of a verdict for the victims of the Ride the Duck incident that resulted in the death of five North Seattle College international students in 2015.

Under Washington state law, survivors may bring wrongful death actions for damages suffered due to the victim’s death, as well as continue actions that the victim could have brought prior to death. While a victim’s spouse or domestic partner and children historically have been entitled to bring these actions, state law had limited the availability of these claims for secondary beneficiaries, including the victim’s parents and siblings. Secondary beneficiaries who did not reside in the United States at the time of the victim’s death could not file these claims. Parents who did not regularly support their adult child victim and parents and siblings who were not economically dependent on the victim were also prohibited.

S.B. 5163 removes these residency and dependency requirements for victims’ parents and siblings. The law allows them to recover not only economic damages, but also noneconomic damages, including pain and suffering and damages for the destruction of the parent-child relationship. The law applies retroactively to all claims that are not time-barred as well as to claims currently pending in court.

Seattle attorney Karen Koehler, who represented the Ride the Ducks plaintiffs, described how the historical limits on wrongful death claims impacted two claims in the 2019 trial. “The causes of action available were in stark contrast because of the way the old law classified death claims,” she said. Koehler explained that the jury had awarded the two Austrian teenage sons of Claudia Derschmidt more than $20 million in noneconomic damages for the loss of the relationship with their mother. However, the jury was not allowed to consider the loss of relationship or pain and suffering claims brought by the parents of 22-year-old HaRam Kim, of South Korea, who survived the crash but died three days later in the hospital. Koehler said that for Kim’s family, “the jury was only allowed to consider the best-case scenario net economic loss equation of what Kim could have earned minus her consumption.”

The newly enacted law “recognizes the dignity and worth of single adults with no children, but who are survived by any parent or sibling,” Koehler added.