Friday was the 42nd anniversary of the Kent State shootings

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-mct-kent-state-remembers-victims-on-42nd-anniversary-20120505,0,1010328.story

http://www.kent.edu/news/announcements/success/commemorationmay4.cfm

http://www.kent.edu/may4/

http://www.kent.edu/about/history/may4/newsroom/

Legal liability for the Virginia Tech massacre: lessons of earlier mass shootings?

Jim Castagnera

Part 1 in a series

The April 16^th Virginia Tech massacre sent editors and writers scurrying to their microfiche and video vaults, and lawyers to case law.

Jim Castagnera

The very day of the tragedy, CBS News recalled the mother of all campus mass-murders – the August 1, 1966, slaughter of 16 by a sniper from the top deck of theUniversity of Texas Austin’s landmark tower.
But arguably America’s most notorious campus killing spree was the May 4, 1970 shooting of 13 students in about as many seconds on Kent State’s campus.  It has retained the public eye into the new millennium, thanks chiefly to a 2001 Emmy-winning documentary and Reporter-Novelist Philip Caputo’s 2005 book.
In the lingo of American tort (that is, personal injury) law, Virginia Tech more closely resembles theUniversity of Texas. Both campuses were victimized by an unexpected and entirely unwanted intruder. If either institution, its officials and safety forces are legally liable, then the basis must be negligence – some common-law sin of omission. University executives should nonetheless familiarize themselves with the range of civil liabilities they may face in such dire circumstances.
Kent State legally different than Texas or Virginia Tech
Kent State’s shootings implicated higher levels of legal liability … on both sides of the gun barrels. First, contrary to the clear innocence of the shooters’ victims at U.T. and V.T., an argument could be (and, in fact, was) made for student culpability in the tragedy of the K.S. Commons. Likewise, state officials from the governor of Ohio down to the president’s office at the university shared in the decisions that led to four dead and nine wounded students.
On May 1, 1970, students demonstrated against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. On May 2, a mob burned the Army ROTC barracks on campus. The following day, the Ohio Riot Act was read and tear gas fired, before the students abandoned the campus Commons. A day later, the Ohio National Guard fired into the reconstituted campus crowd.
Immediately after the shootings, officials attempted to blame the protesters. On May 15, the Portage County Prosecutor displayed a shotgun, a pistol, machetes, cap pistols, slingshots and BB guns confiscated from dorm rooms. The ACLU labeled the search illegal and its fruits “meager.”
On June 6, the Ohio legislature enacted a campus riot law, which took effect in the fall.

The legal tide seemed to turn on June 10, when the parent of a dead student filed suit in federal court, asking $6 million against the governor and the guard commanders for “intentionally and maliciously disregarding” students’ safety. On June 23, a U.S. Department of Justice report concluded the shootings “were not necessary and not in order.” Wrongful death suits followed from the other three decedents’ families.
Meanwhile, the pendulum took another swing, as a special grand jury indicted students and faculty for riot, assault and incitement. After unsuccessfully fighting the charges all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a number of these defendants were eventually fined and imprisoned.
All four of the wrongful-death actions were dismissed on the ground of Ohio’s sovereign immunity from suit. But in 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Scheuer v. Rhodes, an action by the family of one victim, that  Governor Rhodes and other individual state actors, including Kent State’s president, could be sued.  State immunity, said the Supremes, is “no shield for a state official confronted by the claim that he had deprived another of a federal right under color of law.” Meanwhile, eight guardsmen were indicted on civil rights charges by a federal grand jury; all were eventually acquitted.
In 1975’s Krause v. Rhodes, which consolidated all four decedents’ wrongful death claims, a federal jury found the defendants not liable by a 9-3 vote, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. As legal wrangling over campus construction that would obliterate the scene of the shootings dragged on, the parties settled for $675,000 in 1979. The four families had sought a grand total of $46 million.

While the settlement amount was relatively small, the cost to Kent State was enormous in terms of legal costs, distraction from the core mission, faculty imprisonment and damage to the school’s reputation.