Cruise Bruise Blog
March 16, 2009
March 16, 2009
RCCL Crime Stats Are So Vast Providing Them To A Judge Is A "Burden"
It gets harder and harder to believe that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL) is serious about crime on their cruise ships when they pull stunts in court like Cruise Bruise has discovered today.
I am about to say, what many of my visitors already know, given that about 30% of you have masters degrees or higher, and are about as tech savvy as they come. Software is relatively cheap, and has taken the back-breaking work out of assembling figures for more years than some of my youngest readers have been alive.
In a recent court case, an opinion on appeal was filed May 23, 2007, No. 3D06-1885, in a case where a crew member barged into a passenger's cabin on RCCL M/S Sovereign of the Seas, attacked a woman and her child and they fought him off without the help from staff who did not respond to their pleas during the attack.
When the family decided to sue in Miami-Dade County, Florida for the attack during their cruise, under the victim names Sarah Doe and Jane Doe, they got the run around from RCCL lawyers when pressed for statistics on violent incidents aboard RCCL ships.
The cruise line said that they were too big to provide crime statistics, had too many reports to go through and this placed an unfair "burden" on them to gather the data in the discovery phase of the trial.
I think, it would have been nice, if the lawyer's representing the victims in this case, would have known that RCCL considers themselves pretty savvy and state-of-the-art when it comes to statistics, and could have presented that fact to the judge.
As Cruise Bruise reported in one of my most recently posted cases, a Royal Champion told members (and the world) at Cruise Critic that when they asked RCCL why they were chosen to be a Royal Champion, they were told:
"Royal Champions are selected based on a proprietary methodology to recognize influential online contributors."
Surely, if RCCL can manage a statistical program complex enough to churn data within a software program of "proprietary methodology", they could have managed to build or purchase a software program to churn through the data of 29 ships a year, taking less than 1,500 cruises a year, when it came to crime reports.
The victims in this case submitted a request for discovery (to find out exactly how often victims are in a situation on their ships where violent attacks take place and the victim might have some fear that a sexual assault might take place in the course of that incident), demanding RCI provide crime statistics and it ended up on May 23, 2007 coming before Third District Court of Appeals. The challenged discovery is as follows:
Interrogatories and a Request for Production to RCCL.
"Interrogatory #18 provides as follows: In the 5 years that predate the date of this incident, how many reports have [sic] Royal Caribbean International received concerning a crew member either battering or assaulting a passenger. The information sought here concerns Royal Caribbean International’s entire fleet, including vessels owned[,] operated or managed by its subsidiaries and affiliates."
"Request for Production #10 provides as follows: A copy of all incident/accident reports regarding prior accidents or incidents involving claims of crew members [sic] assaults occurring on vessels owned, operated, or managed by Royal Caribbean International or any of its subsidiaries for the 5 year period predating the incident described in the Complaint."
To be clear, we are looking at stalking's, assaults, cabin break-ins and sexual harassment, narrowing the scope of incidents that would place a passenger in a situation where she might fear that a sexual assault was imminent. It would seem to me that flagging data base entries as they were entered into the data base for physical violence and the threat of physical violence, would be enough to find these incidents with a few computer keyboard keystrokes.
RCCL objected to Interrogatory #18 and Request for Production #10, arguing that the discovery was "...burdensome, harassing, oppressive..."
The victims filed a motion to compel RCCL to respond. The trial court overruled RCCL’s objections and ordered RCCL to respond within sixty days.
Having failed at convincing the judge their HUGE international operation of 29 ships made the discovery a "burden", RCCL filed a motion for reconsideration, asserting that the incident/accident reports involving crew were protected by the work-product privilege.
In support of its motion for reconsideration, RCCL submitted an affidavit by Pamela Powell, RCCL’s Supervisor of the Guest Claims Department. Powell averred that after any incident is alleged on a RCCL vessel, RCCL creates an incident report, and thereafter, the report is automatically sent to the “Risk Management Department for further handling and use in connection with the anticipated defense of any claim which arises from said incident.”
Powell also explained that: RCCL has "never been ordered to produce a listing of reports where someone felt that they were going to be [sexually] battered, but were not actually [sexually] battered."
At root here is the claim by the victims that in the course of the violent break-in of their cabin by the crew member, the two females, alone in their cabin, were scared nearly to death that they were about to be sexually assaulted by a crazed crew member. It would be a reasonable expectation under the circumstances.
I can understand, how severely traumatized a young girl would be after such an incident, and that it might even cause her to have nightmares for a very long time. That mother and daughter thought they were fighting for their lives. I can only imagine after they managed together to fight him off and push him out of their cabin, they locked the door, sat down and hugged each other and had a good long cry.
I know that is exactly what I did when I managed to get away from a machete wielding armed robber at an ATM one night 25 years ago (who was then arrested and convicted). Whether you are injured or not, the terror of fighting off a male attacker can live within you forever.
RCCL then dropped this bombshell on the judge, saying that they "maintain a database of incidents, but the categorization of those incidents does not include assaults as such".
RCCL additionally claimed that the discovery order would require RCCL to search its documents for twenty-nine vessels. (my computer could do that in about two minutes)
While its motion for reconsideration was pending, RCCL filed a petition for writ of certiorari in the court seeking to quash the trial court’s discovery order.
The court deferred ruling on RCCL’s petition to allow the trial court to rule on RCCL’s motion for reconsideration. At the hearing on RCCL’s motion for reconsideration, RCCL argued that it could not obtain the information the victims were seeking by searching its computer databases.
RCCL’s counsel explained, “[W]hen you are dealing with an assault where someone fears they are going to be raped, there is not a categorization for that.”
Regarding RCCL’s asserted work-product privilege, counsel for the victims claimed that RCCL had waived the privilege due to RCCL’s failure to prepare a privilege log.
The court ruled against RCCL again, but lowered the demand of time frame from five years to three years and restricted it to all RCCL ships not all RCI ships.
This is one of the cruise lines trying to convince the public that they take safety aboard their cruise ship seriously and yet simply providing information on their crime statistics is a "burden" and "harassing".
The RCCL court case file described above is Here
