A woman who says she suffered serious injuries while trying to save her neighbors’ dog from a canal can’t sue the pooch’s owners, New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The court unanimously rejected Ann Samolyk’s claims that laws allowing legal action for injuries suffered while rescuing a person who put themselves in peril should allow her to sue for damages, the AP reports. But the justices acknowledged that the law could apply to property in some cases where protecting human life also is the ultimate aim.
The court wrote Monday that there could be circumstances in which trying to save property could qualify under the so-called rescue doctrine—for example, if a homeowner is injured trying to put out a fire in a nearby house on a reasonable belief that inhabitants might be in danger—but ruled those circumstances didn’t exist in Samolyk’s case. “Notwithstanding the strong emotional attachment people may have to dogs, cats, and other domesticated animals, or the great significance some may attribute to family heirlooms, or works of art generally considered as irreplaceable parts of our cultural history, sound public policy cannot sanction expanding the rescue doctrine to imbue property with the same status and dignity uniquely conferred upon a human life,” Judge Jose Fuentes wrote.
In her lawsuit, Samolyk alleged she suffered neurological and cognitive damage after jumping into the canal in Lacey Township at the New Jersey shore in 2017 to save the dog after she heard someone call for help. The dog was unharmed.
…let me get this straight. This law rewards people for overestimating their abilities and sucking at rescue?
…New Jersey is weird…
After the Geico HPV case any thing is possible
“…she suffered neurological and cognitive damage after jumping into the canal…”
Are we sure she wasn’t neurologically and cognitively damaged WHEN she jumped in?
In The Free West(TM), people should be paid for failure.
That’s the, entire, point of The Free West(TM).
Why link to a story when it only has one more sentence than the teaser and that sentence adds nothing to the story? I don’t understand the internet anymore. I am so close to leaving it for good.
Go play in the street. Go jump in the canal.
“neurological and cognitive damage”
Was it Love Canal?
https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/love-canal-tragedy.html
.
Doug Wakeman, well bye…..
Doug, thank you for saving me time of hitting the link