Opinion ID: 1527812
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Closeness of Connection Between Conduct and Injury

Text: This factor is the proximate cause element of a negligence action considered on the macroscale of policy. Consideration is given to whether, across the universe of cases of the type presented, there would ordinarily be so little connection between breach of the duty contended for, and the allegedly resulting harm, that a court would simply foreclose liability by holding that there is no duty. The defendants in the instant matter argue the closeness of connection factor from two aspects, superseding cause and remoteness. The defendants say that the law considers suicide to be a deliberate, intentional and intervening act which precludes a finding that a given defendant is responsible for the harm. Brief of Appellees at 6. Defendants cite McLaughlin v. Sullivan, 123 N.H. at 339, 461 A.2d at 125, where the court held that an attorney's alleged malpractice, in not requesting a stay of sentence or bail pending appeal in a criminal case, could not have been the proximate cause of the client's suicide in jail during the first day of confinement following conviction. Here, however, we deal with the relationship between an adolescent and school counselors who allegedly were informed that the adolescent was suicidal. Legally to categorize all suicides by adolescents as knowing and voluntary acts which insulate the death, as a matter of law, from all other acts or omissions which might operate, in fact, as causes of the death is contrary to the policy manifested by the Act. The Act does not view these troubled children as standing independently, to live or die on their own. In a failure to prevent suicide case, Maryland tort law should not treat an adolescent's committing suicide as a superseding cause when the entire premise of the Act is that others, including the schools, have the potential to intervene effectively. [6] The defendants also argue that [i]n blaming the Board and the school counselors for his daughter's death, [Eisel], at most, makes out a case for a remote cause, one which is speculative and inconclusive. We have held, supra, Part I, that this issue of causation in fact is not before us on this appeal. Obviously, when the factual skeleton, on which the duty issue has been presented to us, has been fleshed out with evidence at trial, causation may be a question for the jury, or it may develop that, as a matter of law, any causal connection has been severed by some fact, other than that death was essentially self-inflicted.