Haynes v. Middletown

Summary

Justice Eveleigh concurred in the judgment remanding the case for a new trial but criticized the lack of clarity in the identifiable-person, imminent-harm exception to municipal immunity. The concurrence agreed that a reasonable juror could find that ongoing locker-room horseplay and a broken locker created a risk so likely to cause injury that officials had a clear and unequivocal duty to act immediately. It proposed that imminence should depend on whether the danger was, or should have been, apparent as likely to cause harm in the near future. The concurrence therefore would have preserved a meaningful role for juries in comparable circumstances.