Judge rules that 4-year-old can be held accountable for death due to accident

A judge in New York ruled that a 4-year-old girl who accidentally hit and killed an older woman with her bicycle can be sued for negligence. According to recent articles in the New York Law Journal and the New York Times, Justice Paul Wooten of State Supreme Court in Manhattan has permitted that a lawsuit against two children and their parents be allowed to move forward.

The accident occurred in 2008, when the girl, her friend, and their two mothers were making their way down 52nd street. The two children, apparently racing their bicycles, struck 87-year-old Claire Menagh, who then broke her hip and died 3 months later. Since that time, the estate of Claire Menagh has sued both the children and their mothers for negligence.

When the defense of the girl argued that the girl should not be held accountable, and that New York law prevents the prosecution of children under 4, Justice Wooten pointed out that the girl was a few months shy of 5 years old. He also said that because she was not lacking in "intelligence or maturity" it followed that "another child of similar age and capacity under the circumstances could not have reasonably appreciated the danger of riding a bicycle into an elderly woman."

As a person who has been regularly smashed into by wayward children (and hates it), and a mother, everything about this case just makes me sad. First, I feel for Claire Menagh, her friends and family. How horrible to be struck down and have your life ended prematurely by an accident. How sad to lose someone you love that way, and how galling to think if only something about that day were different, you would still have your sister, your mother, your friend.

And yet, I don't really understand what we're supposed to learn from this judgment. Yes, it was a horrible, horrible accident, but are we pretending that almost 5-year-olds have adult comprehension, or even a baseline understanding that they could actually kill someone? Are we really at a point, as a society, where we're so unwilling to deal with the natural grief, pain, and dismay that accompany unforeseen events that we'll sue a kid to try to stop the pain?

Here's the sad thing about this case: Everyone lost something huge. Claire Menagh lost her life. The children's parents lost control of their kids for a moment that will live with them forever. The children themselves lost their innocence. While an almost 5-year-old may not always be able to size up their own might in the world, they can certainly be traumatized by the fact that they hurt another person horribly, and in this case, irreversibly. But that's what accidents do: They bring us horrible, unfair ordeals that are not of our own choosing. It's up to the adults to be adult enough to deal with it.

[Editor's note; Subsequent issues of the Times have since corrected the original version and say that Menagh's death had nothing to do with her injuries.]