There are a lot of blanks to be filled in for this. You can be sure I’ll be watching for them.
Some of the families affected by the Robb Elementary School mass shooting are now a part of a major lawsuit.
The class action lawsuit, which was announced Sunday, is going after several law enforcement agencies as well as the manufacturer of the gun used in the massacre.
”What we intend to do (is) to help serve this community, and that is to file a $27 billion civil rights lawsuit under our United States Constitution, one-of-a-kind in the whole world,” attorney Charles Bonner of Bonner & Bonner Law said.
The civil rights attorney is holding no punches. He intends to file a class action lawsuit against anyone who can be held responsible for what happened inside Robb Elementary on May 24.
“We have the school police, OK, Arredondo, we have the city police, and we have the sheriffs and we have the Texas Rangers, the DPS and we have the Border Patrol,” Bonner said.
The defendants also include gun manufacturer Daniel Defense and Oasis Outback, where the gunman bought the weapon used in the shooting.
“There will be some institutional defendants as well, such as school board or such as City Council or such as the City of the Uvalde,” Bonner said.
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The suit is being filed on constitutionality, as Bonner said the victims, survivors, and their families had their 14th Amendment rights violated.
“People have a right to life under the 14th Amendment and what we’ve seen here is that the law enforcement agencies have shown a deliberate conscious disregard of the life,” Bonner said.
Bonner’s law firm is taking on this class action lawsuit with a team of other firms, including a local Uvalde law office and Everytown, a gun safety organization.
See here and here for some background, though it’s not clear to me that there’s a connection between the previous actions we’ve seen and this pending case. Attorney Bonner says he will file in September, after the Justice Department releases its report on Uvalde and the various law enforcement failures.
I have no idea what to expect from this lawsuit. I think the odds of the plaintiffs winning a judgment whose dollar value starts with a B are vanishingly small, but they could win multiple millions. How long it takes, and what the fallout from it might be – assuming they do in fact win and not have the suit tossed by an appeals court or SCOTUS – is anyone’s guess. We’ll know a little bit more next month.
I think the chances of the plaintiffs getting an amount greater than nuisance value out of any of the government defendants is pretty slim. SOCTUS ruled years ago that police have no obligation to protect you. Toss in qualified immunity, and the government defendants pretty much all go away. The case against the rifle manufacturer is going to be weak due to Federal law. That leaves the gun store, who is probably judgement proof.
Agree with Ross, mostly. Unless the gun maker or seller broke one of the myriad of laws concerning gun sales, then they have zero liability and they should be counter suing Bonner and Bonner for malicious lawfare, seeking billions in punitive damages. Justice would be Bonner and Bonner being bankrupted by a judgement against them, with the proceeds, less lawyer costs of Daniel Defense and Oasis, going to the victims’ families, and some small percentage going to a gun rights advocacy group like GOA or JPFO.
An example needs to be made out of Bonner and Bonner so that frivolous lawsuits against clearly innocent parties are never filed again.
As far as suing the police department, they would have to prove that one or more of the folks they physically prevented from going into the school might possibly have been able to save some of the dead in order to have any success. In other words, the actions of the police prevented others from saving the kids. Once you understand the police have no legal duty to protect you, you might begin to question why you have to jump through hoops to defend yourself and your loved ones.
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