Statutes of Limitation and the Tort Claims Act
Last week I had an unfortunate visit from a woman who wanted me to represent her. She had come in to see me a couple of years ago and now wanted to hire me to assist her in pursuing her claim, which had arisen out of an automobile accident. I asked her when the accident had occurred. She answered it had occurred 2 1/2 years ago. I told her that I could not help her, as her statute of limitations had already passed.
She left my office in tears.
Unfortunately, there are rules in the legal system that are
designed for the efficient administration of justice that may work against
you. They limit the amount of time you
have to bring a claim.
Accident claims
If you have been in an accident, you want to settle your
case, but you probably should not settle soon after the accident, because you
may not know the full extent of your damages until some time has passed. The law says that if you desire to file a
lawsuit for losses in a car accident, you must file that complaint within two years
of the date your accident occurred.
For a minor, someone under the age of 18, the statute of limitations does not begin to run until that person's eighteenth birthday. The statute of limitations is said to be "tolled" for these people until they reach that age.
Accident claims involving a state entity-- The Idaho Tort Claims Act
If you have an accident claim against a government entity, you probably need to file a “tort claim” before you have the right to file a lawsuit against that entity. In Idaho, if you are filing against a city, county, state subdivision, or something like a school district or fire district, you must properly file a tort claim within 180 days of the date of the accident. That is not six months; it is 180 days. I know of people who have lost the ability to file their suit and pursue their claims because they thought they had a full six months to file their tort claim. As Maxwell Smart would say, as he held his index finger next to his thumb, "Missed it by THAT much."
And that much is too much.
In the old days, you could not sue the king. The king was immune from suit because he said so. You would not go to the king for justice and say, I want to sue you, or very bad things might happen to you.
Although we don't have kings anymore, we still have our state and federal governments. They make the rules. For many years, the rule was that you can't sue the state or the feds. That rule could only change by statute, and it has. Now we can sue the state for specific accidental wrongs. We can sue for excessive force injuries during an arrest. We can sue if a school bus runs into our car, and the list goes on. However, and this is a bit bizarre, the theory behind our tort claim act is that the state needs to know in advance an estimate of your loss, so that it can collect a boatload of taxes to pay for that loss. It needs to be able to raise taxes to cover the loss, and it can't do that unless it knows immediately how big your claim is.
This is, of course, ridiculous, as your state and local governments are insured by ICRMP, and are all covered by a $500,000 insurance policy to cover these losses. Taxes are never raised to pay for lawsuits.
Other time limits on filing suits
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