New York’s wrongful death law has long been a portrait of injustice. Grieving parents have learned that this is a statute that values the loss of a limb more than the death of an infant. The inability of a domestic/life partner to make a claim for the wrongful death of his or her partner for lack of a marriage certificate is heartbreaking. Our antiquated statute desperately needs revision.

Last year, the New York State legislature passed a bill called the Grieving Families Act (Senate Bill S47A, Assembly Bill A6770), which was intended to modernize our state’s restrictive—and many would say antiquated—law specifying the damages recoverable in wrongful death actions. The vote in June 2022 was 57-6 in the Senate and 147-2 in the Assembly. It is significant that in these days of partisanship, the vote on this issue was overwhelming and bipartisan. Gov. Kathy Hochul vetoed the legislation, but professed at least qualified support for the bill’s goal of remedying some of the inequities in the current method New York uses to calculate damages in cases where there has been a death. In this column, we will explain how New York currently values damages in wrongful death cases; compare it to how damages in wrongful death cases are valued in some other jurisdictions; and discuss how the Grieving Families Act proposed to remedy it.

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