In one corner of the law, minorities and women are often valued less-gctid205450

[Ajamu]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonk/settlements/

In one corner of the law, minorities and women are often valued less

By Kim Soffen

The 4-year old boy was mentally disabled, unable to speak in complete sentences and unable to play with other children because of his violent fits of hitting and biting.

The decision facing one Brooklyn jury last year was how much a landlord should pay in damages to the boy — named "G.M.M." in court documents — after an investigation showed he had been living in an apartment illegally coated with lead paint. To determine that, the jury would have to decide how much more the boy would have earned over his lifetime without the injury.

Attorneys representing G.M.M. said $3.4 million was the right number, arguing that the boy would have had a bright career ahead of him; both of his parents had graduated from college and his mother received a master's degree, according to the court documents. But the landlord's defense put the figure at less than half that – $1.5 million. Attorney Roger Archibald noted that because the boy was Hispanic, G.M.M. was unlikely to attain the advanced education that would garner such a large income.

"The [proportion] of Hispanics attaining master's degrees was in the neighborhood of 7.37 percent," Archibald told the court.

The 4-year-old's case is a rare public look at 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.

As a result, 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.

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.

Click here to read the rest