Seattle’s $30M CHOP verdict: Breaking down how wrongful death damages are calculated

In January, a jury ordered the City of Seattle to pay more than $30 million over the unsolved, fatal shooting of a teenager, Antonio Mays Jr., at the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHOP) zone.

Seattle was ordered to pay $4 million to Mays’ estate and $26 million to his father, Antonio Mays Sr. The financial resolution prompted KIRO host Jake Skorheim to investigate the inner workings of how the parties settle on the amount of money to be paid.

“I’m not trying to be grim towards the or negative towards the people who have perished, but I’m just saying that’s tax dollars. How do they decide on that money?” Skorheim said on “The Jake and Spike Show.” “How does the city start that conversation, and how do they make assessments like, what is a person’s life worth?”

“We’ve got to remember that the final decision maker of the value of a claim is a jury, right? So both sides are trying to predict what a jury might do in the case, and that’s where you start as far as valuing the claim at hand,” Chris Davis, founder of Davis Law Group, answered.

According to Davis, several components contribute to the overall damages: Economic damages, which typically refer to the medical bills, past and future, and wage losses, and non-economic damages, which are commonly referred to as pain and suffering, including humiliation, mental anguish, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment of life.

“So between those two components, each side is trying to predict how might a jury see this claim? What might a jury do as far as money damages? That’s the start of each side valuing the claim and then deciding at some point to come together and try to negotiate a settlement to avoid a trial,” Davis added. “In these two [CHOP] cases, they both perished, and so then it would have just been their families that you would be obviously representing.”

“These, to me, are headline-making cases. I mean, those are huge judgments; it was at $30.5 million in damages on this judgment,” Jake stated. “What is somebody going to get? Is it all dependent on injury and just how much you can argue?”

“It really comes down to the injuries. In a wrongful death case, for instance, there’s pre-death pain and suffering that’s compensable under the law,” Davis said. “So a lot of times, if you’ve got a client or a victim that experienced extreme pain, terror, fright, that’s a separate damage component on the jury verdict form, so the lawyers will try to assess, okay, what is several minutes worth of pain is before you die, right? And there’s no formula involved. Every case is unique.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Davis Law Group is a longtime client and partner with KIRO Newsradio and Seattle Sports