Student was stricken with encephalitis on China trip
By John Christoffersen
Associated Press
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut boarding school is challenging a $41.7 million jury award to a former student who contracted a tick-borne illness on a school trip to China, saying the school could not have foreseen the risk and the award was excessive.
The federal jury ruled in March in favor of Cara Munn in her lawsuit against The Hotchkiss School, a private school in Lakeville. Munn’s attorneys say she suffered insect bites that led to tick-borne encephalitis in 2007 when she was in the ninth grade, leaving her unable to speak and brain damaged.
Hotchkiss this week sought a new trial and a $26.5 million reduction in damages. The school called Munn’s disease unprecedented, saying there are no reported cases of travelers to China contracting tick-borne encephalitis.
“It is unreasonable to expect an organization to take precautions against an illness that no traveler has gotten in the areas to be visited,” the school’s attorneys wrote. The evidence at trial favored Hotchkiss, and the jury’s verdict was “unjust and irrational,” they wrote. “...the jury did not act dispassionately on the basis of evidence but out of a mistaken sense of its role and from sympathy and generosity toward the plaintiff and her family.”
Munn’s attorney, Antonio Ponvert III, rejected the arguments.
“There’s nothing about the trial that was erroneous or that would lead to a reversal of the verdict,” Ponvert said.
The school failed to ensure that the students take precautions against ticks and allowed them to walk through dense woods known to be a risk area for tick-borne encephalitis and other tick- and insect-transmitted illnesses, Munn’s attorneys said.
Hotchkiss argues that Munn failed to provide sufficient evidence for the jury to support her claim that she was infected at Mt. Pan. Hotchkiss also objected to jury instructions on foreseeing the risk, saying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not identify TBE as a foreseeable risk to travelers to China.
“It led to a determination that what happened to the plaintiff in China, an event for which there is no recorded precedent, was nonetheless foreseeable to Hotchkiss and enabled the jury to find Hotchkiss liable for $41 million for something that no one, even a scientist at CDC, would have foreseen,” the school’s attorneys wrote.
Hotchkiss argued that Munn’s parents had the same opportunity to assess the risk as the school, but Hotchkiss was prevented from showing it met its duty to warn the parents about the risks.
“Consequently the jury was unable to consider whether the cause of the plaintiff’s injuries was the decision her parents made to let her travel to China rather than the purported inadequacy of the information provided to them,” the school’s attorneys wrote.
Ponvert said the arguments were already rejected at trial. He said the school’s own expert admitted there was evidence students were at risk of contracting the disease in the area they traveled.
He said the CDC did warn of such a risk and said there are cases of the disease in China. Ponvert said there was evidence Munn contracted the disease at Mount Pan.
Ponvert defended the amount of the jury award, and said the judge followed Connecticut law, which provides immunity to parents in such negligence cases.
