Nick Carter provides commentary on recent federal court decision dismissing personal injury claim of casino patron
A federal court judge in Massachusetts determined that a Rhode Island casino had no legal duty to prevent the robbery of a patron who claimed criminals followed him from the casino before accosting him at a service station where he stopped in Massachusetts on his way home.
As a consequence, U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs dismissed the patron’s personal injury negligence claim.
In her ruling, the judge wrote that plaintiff’s complaint “pleads, at most, that [the casino’s] security cameras caught [the patron] and other individuals exiting the casino around the same time, without incident. It does not allege that the would-be assailants did anything unlawful in the casino or in the parking lot, or that … they did anything to put anyone monitoring those security cameras on notice that they intended [the patron] any harm.”
The patron alleged in his complaint that the casino had a duty to prevent the robbery given that security cameras caught his assailants following him from the gaming floor to the casino parking lot.
The patron also pointed to evidence that the casino was aware of prior similar robberies of patrons, including police records showing patrons were followed from the casino floor and then assaulted and robbed. Police records, according to the complaint, also showed numerous other violent incidents had occurred at the casino prior to the assault and robbery of the plaintiff.
In an article published in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, Nick Carter suggested that the judge’s duty-of-care assessment was too narrow.
“The indication from this decision is that there is a lot of criminal activity at the casino,” Mr. Carter told the publication. “The casino is therefore on notice and needs to be providing extra security measures. If they knew this kind of activity was happening where criminals were following casino patrons to some off-premises location where they robbed them, they probably have some duty to take measures to try to stop that, and that would include better measures to keep these people out of the casino and perhaps better measures to intervene and alert customers as they are leaving.”