By Christopher Goff, Paganelli Law Group
When human beings search for answers after a horrible event, they speculate. They try to examine clues and find a particular direction in which to point the finger of blame.
Something shocking and horrifying happened earlier this month in Texas, where hip-hop superstar Jacques Bermon Webster II, who performs under the stage name Travis Scott, appeared at a music festival. Upwards of 50,000 people attended. Is Scott to blame for the deaths of now 10 concertgoers crushed under the weight of a frenetic crowd that rushed toward the stage?
More than a dozen lawsuits say, yes, Scott is to blame. Still more put event promoter LiveNation in the dock. Other complaints name the venue's manager, Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, as defendant. The county's chief executive, Lina Hidalgo, suggests security plans of Houston police and firefighters were "perhaps inadequate." A criminal investigation is underway.
No one wants to go through such a travesty again, which means we have to know how the stampede started. "We may never know" or "we just can't figure it out" are not answers most of us would call satisfactory, and yet they might be the most reasonable answers in a court of law.
When a concert or large gathering of any kind goes awry with calamitous consequences, there is arguably no bigger issue facing a court than the unfairness of holding people legally accountable for the bad acts of others.
Sure, Scott is fabulously wealthy, with an estimated net worth of $50 million to $60 million and can afford a jury's award to victims' families, but their loved ones were not shoved, bulldozed and mashed together by Scott. In fact, Scott's attorneys insist he didn't even know about the crowd situation until after he stopped performing.
The details of adjudicating cases like this are yet to be hashed out by judges. Writing in the Entertainment Arts and Sports Law Journalin 2018, attorney Brian Caplan pointed out, "Contrary to what one might expect, there is a paucity of case law in jurisdictions around the United States related to venue and promoter liability for acts of violence that occur at concerts." Referencing what she termed "crowd crush" injuries, law professor Tracy Hresko Pearl wrote in 2015 "that there is virtually no statutory law in the United States pertaining to crowd management and control" and that "the jurisprudence surrounding liability for these injuries is remarkably sparse and inconsistent."
Settlements from concert tragedies, however, are often lucrative. Readers may be familiar with the stage collapse at the 2011 Indiana State Fair. Workers notified the crowd about 20 minutes before the storm hit that bad weather was approaching and told patrons where they would go were an evacuation to take place. According to the National Weather Service, the thunder-storm warning was issued at 8:39 p.m. The storm hit the stage about 8:54, minutes before the start of a 9 p.m. Sugarland concert in front of 15,000 people. Seven died. Sugarland, LiveNation and other defendants eventually agreed to pay $39 million to settle a lawsuit against them.
At least in the State Fair affair, there was some clear rationale for fault. The stage used was simply not built to handle winds of 60 to 70 miles per hour, just below the strength of a Category 1 hurricane. The question in the Scott case, one worth watching for Indiana and other states, is whether human action in the form a bum-rushing crowd is foreseeable or preventable.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously commented that a man could be held liable for shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. "Why?" the late Supreme Court justice asked. "Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?"
Tragically, we know the answer to that question in 2021. We saw it in Houston at the Astroworld Festival. The legal system's dilemma is whether anyone not in that madding throng should be punished as if a perpetrator -- or whether massive monetary judgments against organizers and performers simply amount to assigning blame to the innocent.
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