Yes, that is reasonable. Anyone within a couple of years of being able to operate a motor vehicle, should be able to use an iron. That is fine, although stern instructions about the possibility of fire hazard should accompany the permission to use the iron. I think I learned about the danger of irons from Eight is Enough. I think we all have an idea of the tragic consequences here anyway.

Both scenarios seem to hinge on the maturity level of the child--a subjective assessment. My guess is that the DA's office seems to think that this woman made a poor decisions is therefore and unfit parent or criminally negligent. Perhaps the DA has more facts than we do. Without interviewing the children extensively, we're not qualified to make such a decision. Forced to make a general judgement call about when a child can begin to be left alone/handle dangerous equipment, I'd say the 10 year old should not have been left alone (Shane hit the nail on the head--wake the kid up and toss him in the back seat). The 13 and 16 year old should be able to handle ironing the clothes unless they are exceptionally immature.

This scenario raises the question: At what age does a parent cease to be responsible for the actions of their child? When is a child legally able to be left alone? 18? Clearly a normal child develops the capacity to comprehend the ramifications of his/her actions before then. One of you lawyer types let me know what's on the books.

I think it's all subjective rneff3, and depends on the facts and nature of the children in each case. These are questions for a jury to decide by applying a reasonable parent / reasonable child standard. I realize I am asking you to make general assuptions based on limited facts, but I don't think any one here has the time to go through hundreds of pages of deposition testimony. Therefore, just try to render a decicsion based on your own experiences and gut instinct. Afterall, these are the factors most jurors take into acount anyway, regardless of arguments a lawyer may make or testimony presented in court.

Again, call me too lenient but I think that it is perfectly acceptable at age 13 and above to use a clothing iron. Only the slightest injury would probably be sustained if they accidentally touched the hot surface of the iron. Just make sure that there is an aloe plant nearby and that the iron you have has an automatic shut off to prevent a fire from it being left on. Even adults can forget to turn the iron off! The ironing training is also very important.
I used an iron all the time when I was that age - I mean, if I didn't do it, it didn't get done. I was so abused.

By the way - good job on getting a discussion going! All you have to do with this group is mention the words "in your opinion..." and we've got plenty to say!

Shouldn't this post really be part of the comments under the first post? I mean I am jumping threads to keep up with everyone's thoughts on this poor mom and her kids.

sorry samuelad. I thought I would divide this into two issues.

If we combine the two posts it will be a record number of comments and a landmark day in the history of Memphilter! Please combine them so that I have a reason to celebrate. With beer.

I think beer is yummy. (My humble opinion)

Can I combine them? How?

I really wish you had put it under one of my posts, so that my stuff would get this many comments. ;-) I, personally, think the privacy issue is probably more important to us all than is this one (which is just a bunch of parsing hypotheticals for everyone except jimoto).

Can I combine them? How?

It really isn't worth it to go back and combine 'em. For future reference, I think it would probably be best to keep both parts of a discussion like this under one post. That's just my opinion. In your opinion...nahhhh nevermind.

You're right, samuelad, the privacy issue is much more important to me right now. Please note that I have posted a comment to your post about privacy. But don't tell anyone! It's private.

While privacy is certainty an important issue, I think samuelad may be underestimating the importance of the issues in this case. Afterall, cases like these led to the banning of aluminum wiring (see samuelad's post on past disaster), safer airbags and crashworthy verhicles, cigarette warnings, nonflammable silly string, coffe that's hot but not too hot, etc. All kidding aside, we cannot trust corporations to create safe products just as we cannot trust corporations with private information. Without the safeguards created in response to lawyers and the civil justice system, we'd be living in a world filled with Pintos and lawn darts.

I'm still a little sore about my flammable silly string being taken away. Stop touching me there.

Jimoto, you wouldn't happen to be a lawyer, would you?
Geez! I'm tired. I'm going to bed.

Heya, late in posting comments (yucky meetings almost all day!), but I wanted to say that YES, children 13 and 16, unless they have some sort of special mental or physical handicap prohibiting this, should DEFINITELY be able to iron. I know I come from mountain folks, where they send the kids off to work a little younger than average, but I know that when I was 10 I was ironing my mom's and dad's clothing as a bonus to my allowance.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my posts. If you haven't told me what you think, please do so. I think it is important to get as many views as possible from this little web-based jury pool.

As usual, samuelad is correct in his assumptions regarding the facts and damages in this case. Afterall, my ears involuntarily perk up whenever I hear an ambulance. It is easy to become skeptical towards claims of suffering in my job, but this is the most tragic case I've dealt with in my career.

The ten-year-old boy's older siblings were using an iron manufactured by Proctor-Silex, the cheapest model the company makes. One of the kids left the iron on before they and their mother left for school. The iron's inner workings are fairly simple. It mainly consists of a thermostat that is set so that the maximum temperature of the aluminum plate cannot reach much over 300 degrees. Also, the iron cycles, so that it does not remain at 300 degrees-- it will hit the high temp point, then shut itself off, until the temp goes down to around 250, then turn itself back on. Proctor-Silex claims that it is impossible for the iron to pose a fire hazard and, if it is working correctly, they are right. No matter how long the iron sits on paper or fabric, it will not start a fire.

However, there is a little device called a thermal breaker that has been a standard feature on all small appliances with heating elements since the late sixties. The thermal breaker is smaller than the joint in your pinky and is designed to act as a backup in case the thermostat fails. If the heating element ever reaches a certain temp, usually 400 degrees, the thermal breaker will open, cutting off the supply of electricity. The model iron used in my client's case was not equipped with a thermal breaker. We can prove that the thermostat failed, causing the iron to reach a temperature in excess of 950 degrees, beyond the melting point of aluminum. In fact, the iron could have reached a temp over 1300 degrees, enough to destroy itself. Even at 900 degrees, it was hot enough to causing a blazing fire in a matter of minutes.

My client smelled smoke from the fire and woke up. His first thought, though, was to find his pet cat and her litter of kittens. While he was searching, he passed out due to smoke inhalation in the hallway outside the bedroom where the fire started. The flames caught up to him as he was lying on the floor.

When the fire department found him, they thought he was dead. But when they pulled him out of the house into the cold November air, the boy miraculously gasped for air. He's alive now, but is scarred beyond anything that most people in my profession have ever seen. He suffered third degree burns over 50% of his body. His face was burned so badly that most of his nose is gone and he has to wear a mask like some cornball WWF wrestler to hold his skin in place. He lost most of the use of his left hand. The hand has grown so mishapen that his knuckles are poking through his palm. He lost his right foot. He's had a trach tube for the last 2 1/2 years because he is still undergoing numerous surgeries to graft skin where he has none. His entire body is a big scar, either from burns or surgery. He looks reptilian. He's fat because he has to constantly drink protein shakes so his skin will grow back faster and the doctors can harvest it to place on some other part of his body that needs it more. He is twelve now and has suffered pains that are unimaginable. He lost his friends at school because he is a walking nightmare, remarkably like the one on Elm Street. He goes to a special school now, but he is intelligent and heartbreakingly sweet. You can look into his eyes and see an inner wisdom, as if he's aged so much in the last few years that he knows-- knows what pain is, knows what is important in life, knows what he has become and how people see him, knows its unlikely a girl will ever love him, knows how to get up in the morning with a cheerful attitude and a smile on his face that makes it seem like he has been let in on some cosmic secret that only he and God know about.

Cold numbers. My client's medical expenses: so far pushing 1.2 millon dollars. Cost for Proctor-Silex to put on a a thermal breaker that would have prevented the fire: 24 cents. Nothing will make this kid whole, but money will make his road through life a whole lot easier. How much money? Who should pay? Is his mother responsible for not supervising her children while they used the iron and leaving her son home alone? Was Proctor-Silex negligent? If so, how much? Tennessee has a comparative fault system, where a percentage of fault is attributed to all of the potential tortfeasors. If Proctor-Silex was at fault, should they face punitive damages for gross negligence in allowing a product to enter the stream of commerce that did not have a 24 cent device that was standard on all similar devices? How much in punitives? Enough to affect their stock value? That would certainly get their attention. What do you guys think?

Now, then. This becomes wholly different with all the facts table. I would think that it is not responsible to leave a child at home. But if the iron can be proven to be faulty (thermal breaker or no), then this seems to be Proctor-Silex's problem in a big way. If the iron is supposed to cycle between 250 and 300 degrees in a normal working state, and we know for a fact that it got to 900 degrees, then Proctor-Silex, it would seem to me, harbors the great majority of this burden. Even though many of us might find it unreasonable to leave the kid at home, and almost all of is think it is fine to let 13 year olds use irons, I think we can all agree that it is very reasonable to expect an iron to work within the range of performance the company guarantees.
Finally, I was in no way casting aspersions on jimoto's career choice. The lawn darts and Pinto quip is true to the core. American companies have proven not to be the best at self-policing, in general. I'm sure there are many examples of companies that are self-policing, but as a society it is not a good idea to trust them to do it. I was just fishing for the missing fact that would make this story all come together. Thanks for the update, jimoto. If you disagree about the the need for personal injury law, consider this. [embedded Quicktime on page, and not pleasant]

Let's just write a book about it

I think we just did.

How old was the iron? How long can a piece of equpment be expected to remain in 100% working order? Was there a warranty on the iron and had it expired? Are these factors that are considered in cases such as this one?

By the way--I still have some lawn darts in a box in Shreveport. You can take away my flammable silly string, but I'll always have my lawn darts!

The mother bought the iron from a Wal-Mart in 1997. The warranty doesn't really matter, all we have to show is that the iron had a dangerous defect that the manufacurer knew or should have known about and that the dangerous defect caused the injury.

How do you establish that a peice of equipment had a defect that was dangerous? The iron was destroyed in the fire I assume, so you're unable to test it for a defect. Is there a pattern of fires associated with that model of iron? I guess what I'm saying is that you need some definative way of establishing a) that the iron was responsible for the fire and b) that the defect was present at the time of manufacture. Even if you get a fire marshall to say it was (how in the hell they do that I'm not certain), can you then establish that the iron hadn't been abused in some way to prevent it from working properly? The logical defense of the company seems to me to be that young childern abused the iron, thus damaging it and rendering it dangerous. If there is no pattern of dangerous defects in the line of irons, you can't disprove that theory.

Challenge me rneff3, that's what I need! First we can prove the iron started the fire through the Memphis City Fire Investigator and his report. They concluded this based on the pattern of the fire spread and the melted condition of the iron. But this is not enough-- while we may be able to show the iron caused the fire, we cannot show HOW the iron caused the fire without more. That's where our expert electrical engineer comes in, who will show that the iron was not equipped with the standard thermal breaker and can also recreate the conditions that more likely than not started the fire. So long as the court finds that the expert's testing methods and opinions will meet the Daubert standard regarding the admissability of expert opinion, then we can present his proof. We also have another engineer who will testify that the iron should have had a light to indicate that it was on (which ours did not) and that it is difficult to see the knob that shows the iron is in an "on" position. The Defense will then have the opportunity to present their experts who will try to make our experts out to be a quacks-- an engineering battle royal.

As for your suggestion of iron abuse, the defense cannot raise this argument unless they have some proof to substantiate it. There are all sorts of hypotheticals that could be raised, but they will be prevented by the court from doing so unless there is enough evidence to allow the defendant to present an alternative version of the facts. Of course, our clients allege that the iron was not damaged in any way prior to the fire. They are presumed by the court to be telling the truth and, unless the defense has some material with which to impeach them, their statement will be enough evidence as to the pre-fire condition of the iron.

You better have all of those kids read the instruction manual for the iron that they were using and give them an exhaustive course in iron safety. If I were the defense I'd make sure that they looked ignorant of how to properly use the iron in question. In addition: Don't all irons come with instructions that say, "NEVER leave iron on unattended, as this may create hazardous conditions."? Does such a disclamer absolve them of liability if the switch is broken?

If you make the argument that the iron is not easy to use safely (there's no light to indicate if it's on or not) won't that just make the mom look bad for allowing her children to use such a tool? I wouldn't place emphasis on difficulty of use. Rather, I would focus on the hazard that the broken thermal breaker creates. By the way, are irons required by law to have a functional thermal breaker?

Where does one sign up for a course on iron safety? How many times do people actually read an instuction manual before using a fairly simple household appliance that everyone uses in their everyday lives? Of course, I see your point rneff3. The defense will certainly raise the issue of the children's qualifications to use the iron in the first place. However, I again submit that the defense will not be able to show that the children were using the iron in an unsafe manner, except in one regard-- one of them left it on unattended. As for printed warnings, these can only go so far to insulate the defendant from liability.

The defendant has an affrimative duty to take adequate steps in the design of its product to prevent injuries that are reasonably forseeable. In this case, it is reasonably forseeable to the manufacturer that users of irons will forget to turn them off. We argue that it is also reasonably forseeable to the defendant that the thermostat in the iron may fail, resulting in an extreme fire hazard. Since this circumstance is forseeable, the defendant has a duty to take reasonable and necessary steps to prevent the failure from posing a known risk, which could have been done with the installation of a 24 cent thermal fuse. Just because they say in the instructions "do not leave the iron on" does not mean they can absolve themselves from any liability whenever an injury occurs due to someone not following this instruction. If they could have taken a simple, cheap step to make the iron perfectly safe in the event someone left it unattended, then they are required to do so. You can think of plenty of analogies where a manufacturer should not be able to cover themselves with printed warnings if they could just as easily design the product to be safer. The Silly String can probably said "Do not expose to open flame", but, of course, it is reasonably forseeable to the manufacturer of Silly String that children will use its product as a party favor in close proximity to lit birthday candles. Therefore, the manufacturer in this case was still liable for injuries caused by its product.

Also, remember this. If you feel that the siblings and mother were negligent in their use of the iron, this finding will not operate as a complete bar to recovery. In Tennessee, fault is apportioned amongst the parties. For example, you may feel that the mother is 25% at fault for leaving her child unattended and for not supervising her children while they used the iron. That would leave 75% of the fault to be apportioned to the manufacturer, which means they would have to pay 75% of the damages to which the jury finds the plaintiff is entitled.