CT Supreme Court Issues Ruling in Sandy Hook Families’ Lawsuit

NEWTOWN, CT —The Connecticut Supreme Court has reversed part of a lower court's ruling which will allow the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims to continue with their lawsuit.

The Superior Court judge had dismissed a suit brought against the manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used to kill 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The judge at that trial had cited a federal law shielding gun manufacturers from most lawsuits against their products.

In the ruling released Thursday morning, the court's opinion was that the manner in which the assault arms were sold and marketed was at odds with the intent of the federal law that had been used to shield them. The ruling noted that "...if the defendants did indeed seek to expand the market for their assault weapons through advertising campaigns that encouraged consumers to use the weapons not for legal purposes such as self-defense, hunting, collecting, or target practice, but to launch offensive assaults against their perceived enemies, then we are aware of nothing in the text or legislative history of PLCAA to indicate that Congress intended to shield the defendants from liability for the tragedy that resulted.

"The judgment is reversed with respect to the trial court’s ruling that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring a CUTPA claim and its conclusion that the plaintiffs’ wrongful death claims predicated on the theory that any sale of military style assault weapons to the civilian market represents an unfair trade practice were not barred under the applicable statute of limitations, and the case is remanded for further proceedings according to law; the judgment is affirmed in all other respects."

Bushmaster was a subsidiary of Remington, which filed for bankruptcy court protection just shy of a year ago, citing the potential for adverse court rulings stemming from the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, along with heavy debts and falling sales as the cause.

Attorney General William Tong, whose office filed an amicus brief in April 2017 that argued Sandy Hook families did not need to have a business relationship with the defendants to have standing under CUTPA, as long as they alleged they were directly harmed by the defendants' commercial activity, released the following statement after today's ruling:

"I am thankful that the families who have suffered unconscionable losses can have their day in court and can hopefully find some justice. The military-type gun designed to inflict maximum lethality used by Adam Lanza to kill innocent children and adults on that tragic day should not have been marketed to civilians. Our consumer laws were designed to protect consumers from harmful commercial activities of the type alleged in the complaint."