Uber Found Liable in Rape by Driver, Setting Stage for Cases
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If Uber wish to be seperate from those drivers, they need to provide the customer the chance to choose the driver, and have an appropriate review system.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
Is this the first of many to come
This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior).
The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees.
(edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
Is that the legal standard here? No.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped?
> How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.
Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.
They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
Your email provider has systems for detecting spam and removing it from your email. If an email comes into their system and falls under the threshold for being declared spam, but is over the average spam rating for emails in your account, have they done something wrong by allowing it through if it's spam? What if it wasn't spam and they removed it?
These sorts of headlines that espouse a "they knew something and so therefore they are liable" viewpoint seem to me to be more likely to result in companies not building safety measurement systems, or at a minimum not building proactive systems, so that they can avoid getting dragged and blamed for an assault because they chose thresholds that didn't prevent the assault. And not all measurement systems are granular enough or reliable enough to be exposed to end users. Imagine if they built a system that determined that if your driver was from a low income part of town and the passenger lived in a high income part of down the chance of an assault was "higher than the late night average". How long would it be before we saw a different lawsuit alleging that Uber discriminated against minority drivers by telling affluent white passengers that their low income minority drivers were "more likely than average" to assault them? I would hope that this verdict was reached on stronger reasoning than "they had an automated number and didn't say anything" but if it did, none of the articles so far have said what that reasoning was.
Being charitable to the quality of Uber's legal team, I feel they could easily and compellingly have offered this defense.
It's telling that other documentary evidence highlighted that Uber decided sharing its reservations/acting on its system would be detrimental to growth.
Yes, and Uber is very comfortable telling me that rides are at a higher price and that I may wish to wait for a few minutes for a lower price.
So it would seem that they are capable of identifying averages and determining whether data fall above or below the averages.
For example a company can instruct a truck driver what time he needs to have the goods delivered, then the company is also to blame if he has an accident because the schedule was unfeasible while following safe driving practices.
Or a company which is dumping harmful chemicals into the environment.
A cab driver raping a passenger is unfortunately not an isolated happening, it's not particular to Uber.
If the employer makes choices that leads to an unsafe working condition, then that's their responsibility. If that might, potentially, mean the current business model is not viable, well... yeah, too bad so sad. Nobody has a god given right to run a business however the fuck they want.
But I don't think that's the case here. Uber can take steps to mitigate this, it's not like theyve exhausted their options. Frankly, they haven't even tried.
The article goes on to explain that the 1838 view has been adjusted over time, and the linked source discusses this in better detail.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable.
My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
>....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
as well as some
>...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth.
I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.