Wrongful Death

Article courtesy of our partner, lawyers.com, a service of the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory. Wrongful death is a term used to describe the type of lawsuits brought by the surviving relatives of a deceased person, against the person who caused the death to occur. A wrongful death action is separate from the lawsuit that may be brought on behalf of the deceased person (for example, by the deceased person's estate) for damages resulting from injuries to the deceased. For procedural purposes, these actions are typically combined into one lawsuit. The wrongful act may be:

Lawsuits for wrongful death were not recognized in the English common law from which our state legal systems were derived. As a result, almost every state has enacted a statute permitting a lawsuit to be brought by the relatives of a person who died as a result of a wrongful act. These "wrongful death statutes" or "survivor statutes" vary greatly from state to state. For example, in some states only a spouse and children may bring a wrongful death lawsuit, while in other states, grandparents or other relatives may also bring a lawsuit. The idea behind a wrongful death lawsuit is that the wrongful death, in addition to injuring the person who died, also injured people who depended upon the deceased for financial or emotional support.

In a wrongful death lawsuit, the amount of damages can be a very complicated question. Survivors can usually sue for medical bills paid for the care of the person who was injured as well as for burial expenses. But because the idea is that the survivors have been injured by the absence of the person who died, determining the amount of damages requires consideration of what probably would have occurred in the future. The damages that can be assessed may include:

Estimates of future earnings usually require expert testimony involving the deceased person's future earning capacity.