During a courtroom trial for a personal injury case, the judge could ask the jury to make 2 decisions. In most cases, it must decide whether or not to award some level of compensation to the plaintiff. In some courtrooms the jurors also decide on the size for the promised award.
Instructions to the jury should include this bit of advice: In cases of shared blame, the award must be reduced in relation to the percentage of fault. The jurors must determine that percentage of fault by examining the nature of the plaintiff’s actions. Personal Injury Lawyer in Truro knows that juries must also follow the principles that have been accepted in the state where the trial has been held.
Some states follow the principle of pure comparative negligence in cases with shared blame.
According to that principle, there are no limits on the size of the portion of money that could get taken from the award. In other words, a winning plaintiff could end up with a rather small award.
Some states adhere to the principle of modified comparative negligence, if the plaintiff has been charged with shared blame.
The modification puts a limit on the degree to which an award might be reduced. If a plaintiff has contributed to more than 50% of the factors that caused the accident, or caused the associated injuries, then the court cannot award any payment for damages.
A third principle that the juries in some locations must recognize
That is the principle of contributory negligence. It states that if a plaintiff has contributed to an accident’s causative factors to any degree, the plaintiff’s chances for getting compensated for damages has vanished. That rule holds in all relevant cases, even when the percentage for the plaintiff’s level of fault has been as low as 1%.
None of the above principles would need to be in the minds of jurors, if the courtroom in which the personal injury case must be decided was located in a state with no-fault insurance.
In such a state, no jury has the task of determining the identity of the party at fault, and the size of any promised award. No insurance company must cover the cost of the damages that resulted from any accident, as long as both involved parties had purchased an insurance policy.
After calculation of those costs, the insurance company of the policyholder that has suffered the damages must cover those same costs. The only time when a jury might be asked to decide on who was at-fault for a given accident could arise when an incident had caused a level of damage that exceeded a given figure. The juries in a no-fault state seldom hear about requirements relating to shared- blame.
