BrianGarst.com

This is ridiculous:

Convicted last year of intoxication manslaughter for the death of her boyfriend, the 21-year-old daughter of a state district judge is suing the truck driver she ran into during a drunken driving crash.

Elizabeth Shelton, the daughter of juvenile judge Pat Shelton, is accusing truck driver Lance Bennett of negligence in the Oct. 23, 2007, wreck that killed her boyfriend Matthew McNiece.

Shelton had a blood alcohol concentration more than three times the legal limit, two tests showed. She was sentenced to eight years’ probation and had to serve four months in jail.

Shelton, her family and the family of the boyfriend who was killed are suing for $20,000 for the destruction of the Lexus SUV she was driving and an undetermined amount for mental anguish, pain and suffering.

Bennett was driving the box truck that Shelton rear-ended on the Southwest Freeway near Kirby around 2 a.m.

Bennett’s attorney, John Havins, said the lawsuit, filed in October, was the last chance to make a claim before the statute of limitations ran out.

He noted that Shelton named 16 defendants, including insurance companies and banks. “They’re just throwing everything against the wall to see if anything sticks,” Havins said.

Throwing everything against the wall is a common legal tactic for money-grubbing ambulance chasers.  The problem is that our system does absolutely nothing to discourage this behavior.  The people who are penalized are the victims of frivolous lawsuits who must pay their legal fees regardless of the outcome.  The obvious answer would be to adopt a loser-pays system, where the loser in a suit pays the legal fees of the other party.  It’s bad enough that this horrible excuse for a human being only spent 4 months in jail for killing her boyfriend, but now the legal system will condone hero victimizing all over again the people her reckless behavior negatively affected?  This is unacceptable.

frivolous lawsuits