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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Ind. Law - "Indiana law keeps victim's father from suing 911"

Ed Ronco of the South Bend Tribune reports today:

NILES — During Tonya Goble-Studer's 911 call to LaPorte County authorities more than two years ago, she told a dispatcher that her husband was threatening to kill her, would be back soon, and that she needed a police officer's assistance.

The 911 dispatcher told Goble-Studer, who was 23, that for an officer to be sent, there had to be an "immediate threat."

"Ma'am, the officer cannot stand there and just wait just in case your husband comes back," the dispatcher said, according to a transcript of the 911 call.

Not long after, Goble-Studer and her mother were dead — killed by Goble-Studer's husband after she fled LaPorte County up to her mother's home in Michigan.

Her father, Al Goble, has tried to sue LaPorte County for not sending an officer when his daughter requested help. But he says attorneys have told him there's one big thing standing between him and the courthouse door: Indiana law.

County governments in Indiana are immune from civil cases that result from 911 service.

That law was put in place to limit counties' liability as they implemented enhanced 911 services.

And it's been backed up by the Indiana Supreme Court, which in 2007 upheld a lower court ruling in a 911 case involving Brown County.

The county had been sued by Annette Giles, a woman who said her husband died because an ambulance was not dispatched in a timely manner. The Supreme Court agreed that judgment in Brown County's favor was proper because of the immunity written into the law.

A case against the hospital that owned the ambulance is still at the trial court level.

Landyn Harmon, a Columbus attorney who represents Giles, said that case and what happened in LaPorte County are different.

"There has always been a tradition in our law holding the government immune for failing to enforce the criminal law, for failing to protect one citizen from another," Harmon said.

The protection frustrates Goble, who keeps clippings of news articles about his daughter's murder and the trial of Gary Studer, his former son-in-law.

"There's nothing I can do," he said. "My hands are tied."

Here is a link to the ILB summary of the June 25, 2007 Supreme Court decision in the case of Annette Donica Giles v. Brown County, Indiana, By and Through Its Board of Commissioners. The statute cited is IC 34-13-3-3(19).

Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 7, 2008 04:27 PM
Posted to Indiana Law