NY Governor vetoes changes to wrongful death law

New York’s governor has vetoed a bill that would have allowed wrongful death lawsuits to include claims for emotional damage, a change that could have led to much bigger payouts for fatal accidents and deadly medical errors.

The bill, which had strong bipartisan support when it passed the Legislature last year, would have brought New York into line with a majority of other states that allow courts to consider emotional pain when calculating how much a lost life was worth.

Under current state law, the amount someone can get in a wrongful death lawsuit in New York is largely determined by the potential future income of the person who died — a cold calculation that values the life of a person with a high-paying job far more than someone making minimum wage.

Those rules usually mean lower payouts for the deaths of older people whose working years are behind them, and for children whose future earnings potential is unknowable.

In a letter to the state Senate explaining her veto, Hochul, said that while the bill’s goals were laudable, the legislation had passed without enough evaluation of its “massive” potential impact on small businesses and the state’s health care system.

Among other things, she said it would drive up already high insurance premiums and harm hospitals recovering from the pandemic.

Hochul said she was willing to work with legislative leaders on revisions.

“As a parent, I know how precious our children are to us, and I know how devastating it must be for a family to learn that under New York law the life of their child is less valuable than someone older who earns a salary,” Hochul wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday in the New York Daily News. “I also recognize that the law as it currently stands, valuing lives based on earning potential, reinforces historic patterns of structural inequity and racism.”

Bernadette Smith, a grandmother of a two-year-old who died in a car…