The Washington Post reports on “one corner of the American legal system that explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.” According to the Post, “white and male victims often receive larger awards than people of color and women in similar cases, according to more than two dozen lawyers and forensic economists, the experts who make the calculations.” These differences “largely derive from projections of how much more money individuals would have earned over their lifetimes had they not been injured – projections that take into account average earnings and employment levels by race and gender.” The Post adds that in one case, “when a 6-year-old girl and a male fetus were killed in the same car crash, the settlement for the fetus was calculated to be up to 84 percent higher than the girl’s, according to court records.”
From the news release of the American Association for Justice.
