Hypothetical case--a question for attorneys

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I fail to see how an open-water diver has a duty of care to a divemaster. Especially a "traditional" duty of care created by signing a contract. A duty of care can be traditional, or contractual, but not "traditional by contract."
As an attorney, it irritates me to no end to have amateurs flinging terms of art around without the background or education to use them correctly. All it does is muddy the water. Or perhaps, given the forum, silts up the water.
 
bingo kombiguy! If I'm DM and I choose to chase someone into a dangerous depth, it would be my own heroic stupidity. If I'm flying a jump plane and a skydiver jumps out w/out a chute on, and I jump out w/out one also, what's that make me? Dumb.And dead. I know a tiny dive group who are petrified of liability issues to the point they'd rather dive in swimming pools! Lame.
 
John, assuming you could prove the facts of your scenario (perhaps "Bob" put something on FB?), then I'd be quite happy suing Bob for intentionally endangering Jill and/or the DM -- including criminal liability. Bob knew, or should have known, that either or both his buddy and the DM would attempt to stop him AND that such an attempt would endanger all. This should be sufficient to create both the criminal intent and the civil intent needed.

Flots showed that he is correct -- he is NOT an attorney. I continue to wonder why people think they are qualified to respond to such questions under those circumstances. I know I don't know anything about a whole lot of issues (medicine and computers being two) so I refuse to respond to those questions.

Flots is also wrong when he writes "but in the end he has no responsibility to anybody but himself." That is just wrong -- as many attorneys have pointed out over and over again.

As is often the case, there can be a big difference between moral / ethical responsibility and legal responsbility.

Notwithstanding that, and assuming your legal interpretation is correct (IANAL, but it certainly looks like a defensible position), I would argue that he is morally and ethically responsible as well. Yes, we are all responsible for our own safety. But given that we dive on the buddy system with all that it implies, there is an expectation that you will help your buddy (whether you choose to rely on that for your own safety or not).
 
John, assuming you could prove the facts of your scenario (perhaps "Bob" put something on FB?), then I'd be quite happy suing Bob for intentionally endangering Jill and/or the DM -- including criminal liability. Bob knew, or should have known, that either or both his buddy and the DM would attempt to stop him AND that such an attempt would endanger all. This should be sufficient to create both the criminal intent and the civil intent needed.

I am confused. Are you suggesting that you would sue under some criminal statute or theory? And I was taught that criminal intent, or mens rea, was substantially different than the "knew or should have known" civil test of reasonableness. And civil liability doesn't depend on "civil intent." It depends on four separate and distinct things, not one of which is intent.
It strikes me that you're mixing two different things.
 
Duty of care - The divemaster has a duty of care to his divers via their payment for leading the dive.

How does that work? I've never seen any liability relase or any other paperwork that says that the DM will do anything in particular.

The divers also have a duty of care to the divemaster via their signing of the standard liability release form.

Seriously? How does signing something that says "I'm on my own and you're not responbsible for anything" translate into "I'll watch over the DM"?

Jill and Bob share a traditional duty of care based on whatever safe diving practices are enforced by their organization.

Recreational SCUBA training attempts to train divers to not die. For an OW diver, there is no "duty of care" aside from avoiding injury or death, and possibly assisting your buddy in an emergency if it's safe to do so.

In court one could argue that, if Jill was trained in an organization that stresses staying with a buddy at all times and does not mention not putting oneself in danger, the training instructor or organization could be held liable.

???? So you think the instructor or certification agency could be sued because the diver ignored training? That's just bizarre.

I took a welding class. The instructor definitely told me about some stuff that might cause me to get blown up. Do you seriously think I could sue him if I got hurt doing something he specifically said to not so?

flots.
 
How does that work? I've never seen any liability relase or any other paperwork that says that the DM will do anything in particular.



Seriously? How does signing something that says "I'm on my own and you're not responbsible for anything" translate into "I'll watch over the DM"?



Recreational SCUBA training attempts to train divers to not die. For an OW diver, there is no "duty of care" aside from avoiding injury or death, and possibly assisting your buddy in an emergency if it's safe to do so.



???? So you think the instructor or certification agency could be sued because the diver ignored training? That's just bizarre.

I took a welding class. The instructor definitely told me about some stuff that might cause me to get blown up. Do you seriously think I could sue him because I did something he specifically said to not so?

flots.

(Don't take this the wrong way, it really is NOT intended to offend)

If you are older than 20, you should have enough life experience to recognize that what you may view as right and just is not always reflected in the outcomes from our legal system.

Our legal system (and yes, I am in Canada, but in many ways we experience the same results) allows people to evade personal responsibility and push legal responsibility to others in a whole bunch of ways in a whole bunch of areas.

Doesn't matter what releases you sign in many cases either.
 
John:

I've been absent from the board from a while, but yours is the first post I read when I logged on yesterday. Your hypothetical is actually a bit more complicated than you probably intended.

First, Cozumel is in Mexico. Mexico's tort law is positively paleolithic compared to U.S. tort law. Mexican torts come directly from the Napoleonic Code of 1804, and those sections of the Civil Code haven't been updated in two centuries. And the jurists who penned those code sections didn't have a high opinion of common law torts espoused by Britain and its possessions.

Tort liability in Mexico is largely based upon contract. If a person fails to undertake an obligation imposed under a contract, then liability may arise. For instance, if the operator agreed to conduct a dive and someone got hurt, liability would arise under the contract for that injury.

Mexico also has a concept of "objective liability" which is akin to strict liability in the U.S., but its application is fairly limited and would not reach this situation.

A third concept is "extra-contractual liability." This area of law is extraordinarily undeveloped in Mexico and the code sections relating to it are scant. This is the area where one might find negligence (as a U.S. attorney understands it), but exactly what it is an how it is implemented is largely a mystery. Tort practice is essentially non-existent in Mexico. The majority of firms do not accept tort cases (some boast that they've never accepted a tort case).

Moreover, any sort of contributory negligence on behalf of the victim is a complete bar to recovery under Mexican law. So doing something stupid (like chasing your buddy beyond certification limits) could prevent recovery. Interestingly, Quintana Roo is the only state that has not adopted the Federal Civil Code's contributory negligence bar. However, if the diver booked the excursion through a U.S. entity rather than a Mexican entity, an exception applies to the case and the Federal Civil Code governs the issue.

Bizarre, wot?

Also, tort recoveries are pitifully low in Mexico. They're based on a factor of the minimum wage in effect on the date of the accident, multiplied by four, then multiplied by the number of days the injury exists. There is no "pain and suffering" recovery or punitive damages, which is where you see the really large awards in the U.S.

Assuming that Bob and Jill came back to the U.S. and Jill sues Bob, we may (or may not) have a different result. The first question is, did Bob owe a duty of care to follow the dive plan? The question of duty turns on whether a consequence of an action is foreseeable (which is an odd standard by itself). So was it foreseeable that Jill would follow Bob to 250 feet? Jill is trained not to go below 130 feet. But she is also trained to stick with her buddy. That's a hard call. I think that any expert witness put on the stand would say that every recreational agency would train Jill not to follow a buddy below 130. So no, Jill's following Bob down was not a foreseeable event. If the event was not foreseeable, Bob owed no duty to Jill, and Jill loses on summary judgment.

The only reported case of which I am aware involving the duty of a buddy is Rasumussen v. Bendotti. I've discussed it at length in other posts on this board. In that case, the duty owed to a buddy extends at least to the conduct of pre-dive safety checks, but the duty to a buddy can be superseded by a personal emergency. So under Rasmussen, it's o.k. to leave a buddy if you have a problem.

On the intentional tort case against Bob, I think Jill would have to demonstrate that Bob knew Jill would unavoidably respond in a particular way when he bounced to 250, took actions calculated to produce her response, and that injuries resulted only because of Bob's actions. Jill would have to prove that Bob is one seriously evil bastard, and that her free will was terminated or suspended as a result of his actions. I don't see it happening, but I'm just making up this analysis based on what I know about intentional torts (which isn't a whole lot).

Of course, Bob could argue that even if he did disregard the plan, both the DM and Jill assumed the risk of a known possible injury when they followed him down, and that would insulate him from liability.

This is probably an unsatisfying discussion, but it's an odd hypothetical.
 
Let me answer this from the perspective of an Expert Witness, rather than an attorney. First of all please let me move the scene to Hawaii from Mexico since all I know about Mexican law is that you should run for the border whenever possible. I once worked a case where the Mexican operator who was most responsible was not even named, but the US Instructor, the US shop the organized the trip and the US booking agent were, such are the problems with incidents in Mexico.

If the case was sent to me by Bob's attorney, I would send him a note declining it and suggesting that if Bob had not yet been served he should feel lucky.

If the case was sent to me by the DM's or Jill's attorney I would be happy to take the case, since I believe that Bob's actions amount to reckless endangerment: e.g., conduct that creates a substantial risk of serious physical injury or death to another person. Granted that is is only a misdemeanor, but it still placed Bob on what I perceive to be the wrong side of the law.
 
I'm with Flots - Diver Bob has no liability, other than moral guilt.

All divers know diving is not a zero risk activity: everytime I put my head underwater, I accept I might die.
I don't expect other divers to risk their lives trying to save me, and equally if you're in trouble don't count on me to save you. I might, but don't count on it

I think the same applies to the DM: stupid divers are literally, a daily occupational hazard. Whilst the specifics aren't always known, he should have rehearsed (or even previously experienced) a run-away diver (RAD) scenario in his head.
Does RAD look careless or deliberate? If deliberate - let him go. If careless - have a go at retrieval if safe. Etc, etc

Jill, whilst inexperienced, was certified. And therefore has no leg to stand-on (unless you want to argue the certifying agency standards are so low as to be pointless. But that's another string)
 
When I started this thread, I titled it “A Question for Attorneys.” I have gotten a lot of conflicting advice. I know some of the people giving advice have legal backgrounds. I know some of the people giving advice do not. I do not know about everyone, though.

I really want to be able to tell the difference between someone with legal training telling me what the law is and someone with no legal training telling me what he thinks the law should be.
 
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