Nature of the Case
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Facts
The M/V Andrew J. Barberi was one of several large passenger ferries owned and operated by D. The ferry was 310 feet long and displaced 2712 long tons. It could carry up to 6000 passengers, but on the day of the accident, it was carrying an estimated 1500 people. The ferry's typical speed at full ahead was 16 knots and sea trials revealed that it could come to a full stop from that speed in about 420 feet and within 43 seconds. The Barberi left Manhattan on its regularly scheduled 22-minute trip. The wind was about 25 to 30 knots. The weather was clear and presented no problems for the ferry. The ferry was under the command of Captain Michael Gansas, but for this trip, Assistant Captain Richard Smith was at the helm. Both the captain and assistant captain were certified as first-class pilots, as required by Coast Guard regulations. Both had more than a decade of experience with the Staten Island Ferry and had consistently received good performance reviews. Gansas, who had no reservations about Smith's abilities to pilot the ferry, was not in the operative pilothouse for this trip; he spent the trip in the aft pilothouse preparing for an upcoming Coast Guard inspection. Smith was accompanied by a deckhand, Joseph Selch, who was assigned as a lookout for the trip. Selch later told investigators that he noticed no problems with Smith and they had a normal conversation during the trip. Senior Mate Robert Rush was also in the pilothouse for the second half of the trip, but he had no assigned duties with respect to navigating the ship on this trip and was seated on the settee, a low-slung bench at the rear of the pilothouse, where he had no view of the navigational situation out the pilothouse windows. Smith released Selch from his lookout duties so that he could go assist in preparations for docking. The ferry was traveling at its normal speed, approximately 14-16 knots. On typical trips, the ferries would begin to slow down ' at the buoy it had just passed, but on this trip, the crew and passengers told investigators that they did not hear the engines slow down. Smith had 'lost conscious or situational awareness.' The ferry went off course and crashed at full speed into a concrete maintenance pier about 600 yards south of the slip at the St. George Terminal. Smith remembers nothing from the time Selch left the pilothouse until the crash. Ten passengers were killed. Nineteen passengers were seriously injured, one of whom died two months later. Fifty-seven passengers suffered minor injuries. Smith was 55 years old and was on several prescription medications for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, insomnia, and chronic back pain. Smith had reported to work exhausted. His chronic back problems were causing him difficulty sleeping and during that night he took some prescription drugs for his back pain. He failed to report his fatigue or any of his medical conditions or medications to Gansas (or anyone else), and, in fact, had previously falsely stated on a required Coast Guard form that lie had no medical conditions and did not take any medication. Smith pleaded guilty to eleven counts of seaman's manslaughter in violation of I 18 U.S.C. § 1115, for negligently causing the deaths of passengers, and to one count of making false statements to the Coast Guard in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2). Smith admitted that he was criminally negligent in operating the ferry without reporting his poor physical condition and the medications that lie had taken that morning. Smith was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment. Patrick Ryan, D's director of ferry operations at the time, was also indicted on eleven counts of seaman's manslaughter and several counts of making false statements and obstruction of justice. He pleaded guilty to seaman's manslaughter for allowing the ferries to be operated in a criminally negligent manner by not enforcing the City's internal 'two-pilot rule' that 'generally required the captain and assistant captain to be together in the operating pilot house while the [ferry was] underway,' and to making false statements to the Coast Guard about his practices when he was a ferry captain. Ryan was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. P initiated an action seeking to limit its liability as owner and operator of the ferry pursuant to the Limitation of Liability Act, 46 U.S.C. §§ 30505, 30511. The district court denied D's petition to limit its liability. The cause of the accident was that the assistant captain, Smith, who was piloting the ferry, lost conscious or situational awareness in the brief period after he had released the lookout, but before docking the vessel, and the accident could have been avoided if the captain, Gansas, had been present in the pilothouse with Smith. It found Ryan, the City's director of ferry operations, negligent for failing to enforce a two-pilot rule or otherwise to guard against the foreseeable risk of pilot incapacitation, and that his negligence was a substantial cause of the accident. It held that D was not entitled to limit its liability because the negligent acts that caused the casualty were within the City's privity or knowledge. D appealed.
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