If Uber wish to be seperate from those drivers, they need to provide the customer the chance to choose the driver, and have an appropriate review system.
From a civil law perspective, it doesn’t matter who did it.
The police report is substantial evidence that the event wasn’t made up for the purposes of the lawsuit. Her story was credible to the jury. And Uber’s own algorithms showed significant increased risk for that ride. In other words, Uber knew this could’ve happened and deliberately did not do anything to mitigate the risk.
Even if a rape didn’t really occur in this specific case, Uber knows it has happened many times before. This isn’t a criminal case and they don’t get the assumption of innocence when they have a pattern of guilt.
Let’s put it this way, it’s wrong to assume that an innocent man is always going to be abusive. It is reasonable to assume that someone with a long history of abuse will continue to be abusive.
Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride (drunk female, alone) and didn't take additional security measures.
Lots of riders are drunk; it's evidence of nothing. Are you in effect saying the driver admitted to raping her?
> Uber had already flagged it internally as a high-risk ride
Irrelevant. Numerous rides could be flagged as high-risk without any incident. I am not excusing it, just saying that it doesn't in itself prove rape. As for security measures, the sensible thing is to not allow such matches at all.
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
"In a deposition for a federal sexual assault lawsuit against Uber, former driver Hassan Turay admitted that Jaylynn Dean could not consent when he had sex with her in the back of his car in 2023. 'I had a responsibility to make sure she was in a right state of mind, and I did not do that,' Turay said in a video deposition played in court Wednesday afternoon."
"'Honestly, I didn’t do too much to make sure that she could consent,' Turay said when asked. He never checked in with her or asked if she was OK. 'You’ve just made me see another aspect with the whole thing of consent.' By the end of his deposition, Turay said he was wrong to have had sex with Dean."
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up.
Thus, civil liability. The rapist still goes down for the crime part.
It sounds scandalous here but what does it mean on the ground?
Obviously diff interpretations and practice mean widely diverging truths on the ground with diverging responsibilities.
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk. Risk factors include location and time of day, but SRAD also considers a driver’s weekend and nighttime request rate, scoring them as more risky because they may be more likely to be searching for easy victims.
> The SRAD score for Dean’s trip with Turay was 0.81, which was higher than the late-night average for the Phoenix area. Uber said it never informed Dean of its risk assessment. “We did not, nor would it be practical to provide that information to riders,” Sunny Wong, Uber’s director of applied science, said in a deposition played for the jury earlier in the day.
That said, this system is a double edged sword. It allows you to provide safer services to your customers but it paradoxically also exposes you to another risk. So even though on the whole this system prevents many instances of violence, when it misses and it results in violence, it can come back to bite you. Implied is that if they didn’t have this system more violence on their services would happen, but because they don’t measure driver risk score, they wouldn’t be as liable.
Yeah sure. Totally independent from Uber.
This is quite standard actually, and there's a long common law tradition around this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respondeat_superior).
The question here was whether Uber could claim the drivers were not, in fact, employees.
(edit: A commenter correctly explains that no employee relationship is necessarily required; I should have stated that this was one part of Uber's defense, in addition to the driver having agreed not to assault riders and having undergone a safety screening)
According to the article you linked to, a similar case was already tried in 1838, when a boy fell off a wagon, and the master was not guilty of the behaviour of the wagon driver.
For example a company can instruct a truck driver what time he needs to have the goods delivered, then the company is also to blame if he has an accident because the schedule was unfeasible while following safe driving practices.
Or a company which is dumping harmful chemicals into the environment.
A cab driver raping a passenger is unfortunately not an isolated happening, it's not particular to Uber.
The article goes on to explain that the 1838 view has been adjusted over time, and the linked source discusses this in better detail.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
Is that the legal standard here? No.
How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.
They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:
> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
https://www.courthousenews.com/in-sexual-assault-trial-uber-...
> When matching drivers with riders, Uber uses an AI-powered safety feature called the safety ride assistant dispatch, or SRAD. SRAD gives potential driver-rider matches a score from 0 to 1 based on potential for sexual assault and aims to make matches with the lowest risk.
Are you trying to imply that the driver was not instructed by Uber to pick the woman who was raped?
> How can you even think another way? Only the rapist is guilty of rape. Any other thinking is apologizing for heinous crimes.
The company is responsible for sending a rapist to pick up the woman that was raped.
The rape was a crime.
Uber has civil liability for contributing to its occurring.
>....including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
as well as some
>...suggesting that Uber resisted introducing safety features such as in-car cameras because it believed these measures would slow corporate growth.
I would probably have not been included on the jury because I think uber is run by some of the biggest scumbags in the corporate world but if the article is to be believed it's not an unreasonable verdict unless you think no company should be liable for anything that results from their choices and actions.
From the article:
> internal company documents […] showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her […]
Uber actually had a whole project that produced systems that determine the risk of incidents happening. Could they make rides safer but chose not to? That’s at the core of these lawsuits.
Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable.
My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.