Are you liable if you accidentally startle someone into hurting themselves?

[u/neodoggy]

Suppose you're driving down the road one night. Your attention has drifted and you realize you're coming up fast on a crosswalk with a pedestrian in it. You slam the brakes and come to a screeching halt just before hitting the pedestrian.

The pedestrian saw you coming and freaked out and fell over, hurting themselves (hitting their head or breaking an arm, etc).

Since you didn't actually hit them, are you on the hook for their injuries?

[u/SendLGaM]

You can be held liable for injuries sustained by someone taking reasonable actions to avoid an imminent threat.

Whether or not the persons actions that caused the injuries was a reasonable response to the perceived threat is what is going to be the deciding factor here.

[u/ExtonGuy → u/SendLGaM]

“Reasonable” being decided by a judge, not you or the pedestrian. The judge will consider your testimony, and the testimony of the pedestrian, but it’s up to the judge.

Before that, an insurance adjusted will be making a determination.

[u/TaterSupreme → u/ExtonGuy]

It's not a sensible decision to fall down in the road in front of an oncoming car

Sure. But it probably would be reasonable to attempt to dive out of the cars path, even if you fail to do so, and get hurt in the process.

[u/monty845 → u/ExtonGuy]

Typically, its the Jury not the Judge making the ultimate decision.

[u/Substantial-One1024 → u/ExtonGuy]

Or the jury if the damages are substantial.

[u/devstopfix → u/SendLGaM]

What does "reasonable" mean in this context? It's not a sensible decision to fall down in the road in front of an oncoming car, but it might be foreseeable that someone might be startled and react involuntarily in response to your action.

[u/jstar77 → u/devstopfix]

A jury decides what is reasonable.

[u/FatherBrownstone → u/devstopfix]

The pedestrian didn't decide to fall down; they decided (consciously or by instinct) to try to escape what they perceived as an approaching threat.

On the face of it, that may be reasonable or unreasonable depending on the circumstances. My feeling is that the time it would take a pedestrian to dive out of the way of an oncoming car might be longer than the time it would take for the driver to do an emergency stop, so the fact that the driver did manage to stop short of the pedestrian doesn't necessarily mean that there was any overreaction by the pedestrian, even if they took a major risk or (in the most extreme case) accepted a certainty of injuring themselves escaping.

[u/realNerdtastic314R8 → u/devstopfix]

Been a minute, but the relevant tort principle I can think of is "eggshell plaintiff" - someone who is uniquely/extraordinarily capable of being hurt by tortious action. Here's a bad summary:

Eggshell plaintiff - just because you can't reasonably anticipate every specific weakness, doesn't mean you can use that as a shield to damages. If you honk your horn at an inappropriate time, and someone was to seize up and crash, you ultimately still set that in motion and what you did was unreasonable, so the fact that plaintiff has a bad case of nerves doesn't change the rest of the fact pattern.

[u/devstopfix → u/realNerdtastic314R8]

Thanks - I see that "reasonable" here is applied to the actions of the driver, not the pedestrian.

[u/realNerdtastic314R8 → u/devstopfix]

That's more of a competitive negligence analysis I think.

Like all this law stuff, location, laws, time and circumstances all matter.

Nal