FRANKFORT, Ky. (Legal Newsline) - A woman whose daughter and grandchild were killed in a head-on accident caused by a Sazerac sales representative who left a company party intoxicated can sue in Kentucky, an appeals court ruled, reversing a trial court’s decision to dismiss the case as being brought in the wrong state.
While questions remain about where other plaintiffs actually live and whether a Kentucky court can exercise jurisdiction over the bartenders at the Indiana party, the Kentucky Court of Appeals said the Kentucky resident has the right to choose where she wants to sue.
Carla McDonough is the representative of the estates of Taylor Cole and Braxton Fields, who died after Taylor Barefoot left a Sazerac Mardi Gras party in Jeffersonville, Ind., and drove the wrong way on I-265 in Indiana. Also killed was Cole’s friend Leah Dunn.
Barefoot was later convicted of vehicular manslaughter. McDonough sued Barefoot as well as Sazerac, then based in Kentucky, and Naked by Sunday LLC, an Indiana company that provided the bartenders.
A trial court dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it couldn’t be filed again in Kentucky, after Barefoot and Sazerac argued it should have been filed in Indiana and McDonough had failed to sue “indispensable parties” like the bartenders who allegedly overserved Barefoot and failed to prevent her from getting in her car.
The Court of Appeals reversed, however, saying the only thing that mattered was where McDonough lived. While there was some question as to whether Cole was officially domiciled in Kentucky (she was living in Indiana and had an Indiana driver’s license when she died), that didn’t outweigh McDonough’s right to sue where it was convenient for her.
The appeals court cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision on forum non conveniens to illustrate its reasoning. In that case, a U.S. lawyer tried to sue Piper Aircraft in the U.S. over a plane crash in Scotland that killed Scottish citizens. As the representative of the plaintiffs, not a plaintiff himself, the lawyer couldn’t choose an inconvenient forum for Piper for purely tactical reasons.
“However, the converse is true,” the appeals court said. Plaintiff McDonough was a Kentucky resident who stood to inherit the estate of her dead daughter and grandson so her choice to sue in Kentucky was entitled to “substantial deference.”
It’s possible a Kentucky court can’t exercise jurisdiction over the bartenders or Naked by Sunday, the court went on, but the trial court didn’t investigate the citizenship of any of them sufficiently to make a proper decision. And Kentucky and Indiana are close enough to each other to negate any argument it would be difficult to assemble evidence in the case.