MTA officer wins negligence claim against his employer

The plaintiff was a MTA police officer who suffered an injury in the course of trying to arrest someone in a train station parking lot. He sued MTA for negligence, claiming the agency does not provide its officers with the right vehicle to apprehend suspects, i.e., there is no prisoner compartment in the vehicle. The jury awarded plaintiff $530,000, but MTA appeals, invoking an obscure defense: the governmental function defense. MTA also says plaintiff could not win the case without an expert witness. Plaintiff wins the appeal.

The case is Ojeda v. Metropolitan Transit Authority, issued on July 19. Plaintiff sued the MTA under the Federal Employers' Liability Act, a negligence law for federal employees. (New York does not have such a law, I believe, and you can only get remedies for employer negligence through workers' compensation). 

Under the government function defense, you can sue the government for negligence if the municipality's actions fall within the proprietary realm. What does that mean? If the negligence takes place when the governmental actions are taken for the protection and safety of the public, that's a governmental function. But even if we have a governmental function, to get this defense, the government has to show its decision was a discretionary action. In other words, discretionary misjudgments are subject to the government function defense. MTA does not have this defense, however, because it did not show at trial that its decision to give plaintiff an inadequate vehicle involved the exercise of reasoned judgment. While MTA gave plaintiff a vehicle without a passenger compartment, it did  not prove that it studied backup response times or that it assigned vehicles like through "reasoned judgment." MTA only provided conclusory argument on this point at trial.  

The next case will have a different result, I am sure. As we speak, MTA lawyers are reading the decision to determine how to win this defense at the next trial. I assume MTA has studied this issue of when to allocate patrol vehicles to its officers, and it will put that evidence in the record in seeking pre-trial dismissal. But that did not happen here, and plaintiff is able to protect his verdict. 

As for the expert witness issue, the Court of Appeals (Menashi, Wesley and Pooler) says the trial court acted within its discretion in allowing plaintiff to proceed without an expert. You generally don't need an expert in most cases, the Court notes, as juries are capable of determining when someone was negligent without a university smarty-pants lecturing them on right and wrong. In this case, the Court says, the jury was able to resolve that issue on its own without the assistance of expert knowledge.