The Value of a Person: Wrongful Death Awards in Illinois

When a family loses a loved one as a result of negligence or misconduct, the wounds can go far deeper than money. Wrongful death is by definition a preventable tragedy, and the consequences of that death are likely to resonate over many years for surviving family members. Figuring out how to compensate such families appropriately is a complex challenge that can quickly become fraught with emotion, but the law provides us with some meaningful benchmarks to use as a starting point. Understanding how these figures are calculated and used is essential to understanding what kind of settlement you may receive.Illinois law provides a number of possible avenues for recovery in a wrongful death case. Each of these is designed to defray the cost associated with some loss, either financial or emotional. The basic calculations that are used to arrive at these figures are generally fungible and may rise or fall depending upon the mood of your jury. But the most important overall expense is typically medical and funereal costs – the money you paid for treatment, death, and the memorialization of your loved one. These expenses can easily run into seven figures for a major accident, so the damages for your medical and funereal bills could make up a large share of your settlement.But there are other important factors to consider as well. When a life is cut short, that death will usually prevent years or decades of income and productivity. Damages for lost earnings can represent another large sum, especially if the victim was young or employed at a high salary. Although the usual calculation is done by multiplying current salary by the number of years remaining until retirement or death, a number of additional variables may go into this calculus to arrive at a fairer figure. It is the job of your wrongful death attorney to educate a jury about the victim's most likely earning potential in the real world.And wrongful death victims may be responsible for other financial benefits beyond earnings. A great number of employed people possess benefits such as insurance, pensions and 401Ks, for instance. These values may be suddenly cut off in the event of wrongful death, leaving surviving family members without a safety net in the event of illness or financial hardship. Wrongful death litigation treats benefits as a separate figure from income, so it is important to paint a full picture of the financial support afforded by the deceased.And there are emotional damages as well. The simple truth is that a lost life exacts a price that goes far beyond financial security. The law has traditionally been less good at assigning dollar values to human pain and suffering, but that doesn't mean a jury will not try. In Illinois, emotional damages can take a number of forms, but one of the biggest is the cost of grief. State law changed in 2007 to allow juries to factor in the particular agony that accompanies a wrongful death, and today this figure alone could represent a significant chunk of your total settlement.Emotional damages can also be assigned for loss of consortium, or lost companionship. Just like grief, this term is intended to cover the terrible solitude that follows a preventable death – and calculate how much that suffering is worth under the law. Survivor life expectancy and condition may play a role in this figure, and because this is an area of the law that tries to quantify human pain, the results you get may diverge widely from county to county. Still, it is still important to establish this suffering at trial, as that pain should rightly figure into your final settlement.Lastly an Illinois jury may assign a significant sum of damages for punitive costs. If the act of negligence that led to the death was especially egregious, abusive, flagrant or intentional, juries have considerable leeway to punish the responsible party. Major punitive damages can add many millions of dollars onto your wrongful death settlement – not enough to reverse your loss, of course, but enough to provide some small measure of solace for what you have been through. The key to securing major punitive damages is to prove malign intent or willful negligence clearly.Wrongful death settlements in Illinois are our legal system's attempt to thread a fine needle: assigning value to a human life without reducing it to that value alone. If you are facing a wrongful death lawsuit and want to know what you can expect in the way of deliberation and damages, the first step is to understand the different expenses associated with that death. An experienced Illinois wrongful death attorney can guide you through this process with compassion and clarity.