Advance Release Opinions – December 18

Connecticut Supreme Court

The Supreme Court advance released an opinion about personal injury law involving an exception to municipal immunity, which I review below.

Williams v. Housing Authority – Tough case all the way around. An adult and her three young children died in a fire in a Bridgeport public housing complex. Administratrix sued Fire Department for failing to conduct a statutory fire safety inspection of the apartment. Under the municipal liability statutes, municipalities are immune from liability for a failed or negligent inspection unless the “failure to inspect or such inadequate or negligent inspection constitutes a reckless disregard for health or safety under all the relevant circumstances ….” The trial court granted the Fire Department’s motion for summary judgment, finding that the exception did not apply because recklessness required knowledge of a dangerous condition and there was no evidence that the Fire Department had any such knowledge. The Appellate Court reversed, finding that recklessness required only recognition of a “possible impact” on health or safety from a failure to inspect. The Supreme Court also reversed because neither the trial court nor the Appellate Court got the recklessness standard right. It doesn’t require as much as knowledge of a dangerous condition or as little as recognition of a possible impact. Rather, reckless disregard “is more egregious than mere negligence and requires that health and safety inspectors disregard a substantial risk of harm.” Whether the inspectors did that requires consideration of “all the relevant circumstances” – which really makes the recklessness issue always a fact question for the jury to decide.

After reaching these conclusions, the majority spends a lot of time trying to refute accusations it claims the dissent makes. I’m not so sure it succeeds. For example, the majority “categorically reject[ed] the dissent’s suggestion that we have embraced a per se theory of recklessness with respect to the failure to perform mandated health or safety inspections. Rather, we have identified numerous factors that the trier of fact may consider in assessing whether any particular failure to carry out a statutorily mandated inspection demonstrates a reckless disregard for health or safety under all the relevant circumstances.” That may be true in theory, but it’s hard to imagine how a failure to conduct a health or safety inspection already deemed to be important enough to warrant statutory mandate could be anything other than reckless under the majority’s standard.