On Point - A New Take On Legal News

Teen's Murder Spree Blamed on Violent Video Game

Calling violent adult-rated video games “murder simulators,” an outspoken Florida attorney has filed a wrongful-death suit that alleges the “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” game drove a New Mexico teenager to kill three family members in 2004.

Cody Posey played the game “obsessively” on a Sony Playstation 2 platform before the shootings at a ranch owned by former ABC newsman Sam Donaldson, the complaint says, and “But for Posey's use of these products ... he would not have killed.”

The two plaintiffs -- surviving family members of Posey's victims -– are suing the maker of the “Grand Theft Auto” game series for negligence and marketing a defective product, arguing that Take-Two Interactive Software helped turn Posey into

an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity.

No court has ever upheld similar claims against entertainment companies alleging liability for third-party criminal conduct. But Verlin Posey and Pat Basham are represented by Jack Thompson of Coral Gables, Fla., a tireless crusader for the dubious theory that violent video images cause violent behavior.

“The science is really the clincher here,” he told the Albuquerque Tribune. "What they have found is that video games can train a young person to kill in a blink of an eye.”

Cody Posey was 14 when he shot his father, stepmother and stepsister. Thompson says brain scan (MRI) studies of teens “provide the scientific basis” for the wrongful-death case and notes that the U.S. Supreme Court relied on those same studies last year in striking down the juvenile death penalty.

As for the legal basis, the complaint cites Rice v. Palladin Enterprises, 128 F.3d 233 (1997), in which the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the publisher of a “technical manual” for hit men could be sued for providing “detailed, focused instructional assistance to those contemplating or in the throes of planning murder.”

But Posey did not get that kind of assistance from Take-Two. And neither MRI studies nor Rice are likely to get the plaintiffs past the 6th Circuit's decision in another case brought by Thompson that involved a shooting rampage at a Kentucky school.

In James v. Meow Media, 300 F.3d 683 (2002), the court said it was not foreseeable that the teenage shooter would make the leap from “shooting characters on a video screen ... to shooting people in a classroom” and the defendants “certainly did not 'intend' to produce violent actions by the consumers.”

Thompson claims that Take-Two “engaged in speech, if a murder simulation device is in fact speech, that constitutes incitement to violence.” But as in James, Posey's “glacial process of personality development” was “far from the temporal imminence” required to deprive the defendant of First Amendment protection.

By Matthew Heller
9/26/06