Thursday, October 31, 2013

VA Supreme Court: state has no duty to protect students from gunmen on campus

Via Bearing Arms

 

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The state Supreme Court on Thursday reversed a jury's wrongful death verdict against the state stemming from the 2007 killing of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The justices ruled in the case of two students whose families argued that they might have survived the rampage if the Blacksburg campus had been alerted earlier to the gunman's initial shootings at a dormitory. Erin Nicole Peterson, Julia Kathleen Pryde and 28 other people were killed nearly three hours later in Norris Hall, a classroom building.

But the justices agreed with the state — that there was no way to anticipate the deadly intentions of student Seung-Hui Cho, who killed himself after the killings.

"Based on the limited information available to the commonwealth at the time prior to the shootings in Norris Hall, it cannot be said that it was known or reasonably foreseeable that students in Norris Hall would fall victim to criminal harm," the court wrote. "Thus, as a matter of law, the commonwealth did not have a duty to protect students against third party criminal acts."

More @ Chron

6 comments:

  1. I doubt Virginia, my adopted state, taking its nose out of the feed trough. This election will tell us something. If Cuccinelli loses to Witchary's boy friend McAuliffe, I'll write Virginia off.

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  2. He's catching up. Can't believe a gun grabber is actually ahead there.

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  3. I can't believe the Muslims have a terrorist training compound at Patrick Henry's hometown, but they do and no native Virginian that I know seems to care. Thomas Wolfe meant that when you try to go home again, home is no longer there. He was a hundred years ahead of his time.

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