Florida applies two rules that affect a wrongful death plaintiff’s recovery against multiple defendants. The first is the rule of “pure comparative negligence.” In plain English, this rule states that the jury must apportion fault for wrongful death among all responsible parties, including possibly the victim. For instance, if there are two defendants in a wrongful death case, the jury could decide Defendant No. 1 is 50 percent responsible for the victim’s death, Defendant No. 2 is 30 percent responsible, and the victim himself was 20 percent at-fault. In that scenario, the estate and survivors would be entitled to recover 80 percent of the total damages awarded.
This brings us to the second important legal rule, which is known as “pure several liability.” This basically means that you must separately recover damages from each defendant. So taking the above hypothetical, you can only recover 50 percent of the final wrongful death award from Defendant No. 1, who is not legally responsible for the 30 percent of the damages assigned to Defendant No. 2.