Florida Personal Injury Attorneys Applaud New Hazing Laws
Back in the fall of 2006, a Florida hazing trial that had profound implications for the future of pledges, fraternities and universities, ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked over whether the pledge’s injuries constituted “serious bodily harm.”
The trial of five members of Florida A&M University’s Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity was the first hazing case prosecuted under the 2005 Florida law that made hazing a third class felony if it resulted in “serious bodily injury” or death. According to a Boca Raton personal injury attorney, proving serious bodily injury from hazing is hard to do because the attorney has to prove that the injured party was not a willing participant and therein lays the trouble for juries.
If this case is retried, each of these Florida A&M University students will receive up to five years in prison. The young man who was hazed did not blow the whistle on his fraternity brothers by seeking medical attention - which they advised him not to do - he drove over 250 miles back to his Georgia home and his parents took him to the hospital where he required 25 stitches and over a pint of blood from being hit by a cane and a 2 x 4 over the course of four nights. His father, also a Kappa, called school officials about his son’s injuries from the hazing incident and immediately the five top officials of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity were arrested.
The 2005 Florida law was named for Chad Meredith, a University of Miami student who died in 2001 while trying to swim across alligator-infested Lake Osceola with two members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Officials never filed charges, but a civil court ruled that the fraternity brothers had to pay Meredith’s parents $12.6 million.
Florida personal injury attorneys now have a law at their disposal to use against cases of hazing; even if the victim was a willing participant in his or her hazing rituals which caused the bodily injury. Many jurors understand the willingness to participate in peer pressure style events in order to fit in although they also understand there is such thing as going too far and too much.