Bus Crash Kills Six, Injures Sixteen Others
A bus rolled over on an Arizona freeway last week, killing six and injuring sixteen others. The bus was traveling from Mexico to Los Angeles when it struck a pickup truck on Interstate 10, causing the bus to flip. After conducting an investigation into the cause of the crash, authorities are now saying that the bus had multiple problems, including problems with its brakes and drivers. The brakes were reportedly so bad that the bus should have been taken off of the road, and one of the drivers of the bus may have been unable to read English well enough to navigate the roadways. Both of the drivers also failed to keep adequate logs of their previous seven days of activity.
As this situation demonstrates, there are often several different causes of an accident. Tennessee recognizes this principle and allows a jury to allocate fault among all of the parties to a suit, including the plaintiff or someone who is a non-party, in order to ensure that the each responsible party bears the adequate level of responsibility for its negligence.
For example, if a surviving victim of the bus crash detailed above were to bring a lawsuit against the company that owned the bus, the bus company would be able to claim as a defense that the pickup truck was also negligent (even if the driver of the truck was not sued by the plaintiff) and should bear some portion of liability for the suit. A defendant can essentially claim that any outside party contributed to the accident, but the claim must be in good faith and must be proven to the satisfaction of a jury in order to be successful. Such defenses can thus be very complex and often require the skill and expertise of an experienced Gatlinburg personal injury attorney who can advise a defendant of how to invoke such a defense a well as advise a plaintiff of who all of the possible defendants in a suit can be.
Source: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/other/1110/03-12-2010/20100312035007_05.html
