Lex, Legs

A lorry lumbered along a street in Flatbush, (residential) Brooklyn. It was packed tight with brick. On its side was the dusty legend. GREINER CONTRACTING CO., INC. A child screamed. A few hours later surgeons amputated what was left of her crushed left leg. Lorries of the Greiner company continued to haul brick through Brooklyn streets. Bricklayers continued to slap their trowels for the Audley Clarke Co., which had contracted with the Greiner company for the delivery of the brick. This was seven years ago.

For five years Helen McLaughlin, the child who screamed, skipped about on crutches. Two years ago her father bought her an artificial leg. The artificial leg has to be replaced every year with a new one; an annual operation must be performed to trim the growing bone. The financial burden obviously should have rested on a party other than the child or her father, one John J. McLaughlin, plumber and father of five other children. To recover past expense and to assure his daughter of future care, Plumber McLaughlin brought suit. Supreme Court Justice James Church Cropsey found against the Audley Clarke Co. in the sum of $15,000. But the McLaughlins will get not a cent. Each year henceforth Plumber McLaughlin will foot the bill for $150-- cost of a new artificial leg--and pay the expenses incident to the trimming of the bone.

For this reason can the McLaughlins get no money: When the $15,000 decision was rendered against the Clarke company, that firm's counsel appealed. The higher court (Appellate Division) reversed Justice Cropsey's decision, thereby throwing out the verdict in favor of the McLaughlins. The McLaughlins could not start another suit because Justice Cropsey in his decision had absolved the Greiner Contracting Co., Inc., of all blame. Since there were but two possible defendants to the suit--Greiner and Clarke--and both had been freed of blame, no other party could be sued. In its decision the Appellate Division flayed Justice Cropsey for his lifting blame off the Greiner company.