Abstract
This paper presents a detailed study of jury awards for compensatory damages to victims of crime. Such awards typically result when victims sue third parties who are responsible for some form of negligence such as inadequate security or alcohol over-service. We obtained nationwide data on jury awards to crime victims and examined the relationship between physical losses, medical costs, offender and victim characteristics, and the ultimate compensatory jury award. Despite the large variability in jury awards, we were able to explain 45%-50% of the variation in the natural log of jury awards for physical assault. The awards systematically vary with the severity of physical injuries sustained by the victim. Considerably more variation is found in the case of sexual assault. We use our regressions to construct estimates of noneconomic damages – the pain, suffering and reduced quality of life endured by the average victim of violent crime in the U.S.
Highlights
Despite the ongoing interest in tort reform, with many states having adopted reforms such as caps on noneconomic or punitive damages, surprisingly few empirical studies analyze U.S jury awards [1]
Miller et al [12] improved on this approach by analyzing 1,106 jury awards for physical assaults and 361 cases of sexual assault to estimate “pain and suffering” of victims based on actual criminal victimizations
Several authors outside the U.S context have used jury awards to estimate the cost of crime in other countries – notably Australia [16] where jury awards in transport cases were used as a benchmark, and Canada [17] where average civil awards to crime victims of assault and sexual assault were used to benchmark awards for other crimes based on the length of prison sentences meted out for each crime type
Summary
Despite the ongoing interest in tort reform, with many states having adopted reforms such as caps on noneconomic or punitive damages, surprisingly few empirical studies analyze U.S jury awards [1]. Cohen and Miller [13] analyzed 514 of the 1,106 jury awards for physical assault (and separately 728 for product liability) with a focus on estimating how much juries were willing to award for a lifetime of quality of life. They focused on predicting noneconomic damage awards from functional capacity losses typically associated with physical injuries comparable to the plaintiff’s, as well as characteristics of the plaintiff, defendant, and injury event. Several authors outside the U.S context have used jury awards to estimate the cost of crime in other countries – notably Australia [16] where jury awards in transport cases were used as a benchmark, and Canada [17] where average civil awards to crime victims of assault and sexual assault were used to benchmark awards for other crimes based on the length of prison sentences meted out for each crime type
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