A Brooklyn man who lost his leg after taking a drunken tumble onto the subway tracks at the Union Square station has now lost his controversial $2.3 million jury verdict as well.
In a decision released yesterday, the state Appellate Division overturned the jaw-dropping award to Dustin Dibble and threw out his entire lawsuit, finding the MTA shouldn’t have been held liable for his injuries.
Dibble had been out on a four-hour bender with friends before he tumbled off the platform and got hit by an N train. His blood-alcohol level was 0.18 — twice the legal driving limit.
Mayor Bloomberg had blasted the big-bucks verdict as “incomprehensible.”
“You’d think there’s a personal responsibility here,” he said.
However, the five-judge appeals panel didn’t focus on Dibble’s drunkenness, but on assertions by experts that the train operator, Michael Moore, could have avoided the accident.
“The jury found the defendant liable on the basis of a mathematical formula that used a purported average reaction time as a factor in calculating whether the defendant’s train operator could have stopped the train to avoid running over an intoxicated 22-year-old,” the appeals court said.
“We find that a reaction time that is seconds or fractions of a second longer than the purported average cannot, as a matter of law, constitute . . . proof of negligence.”
NYC Transit spokesman Paul Fleuranges said the agency was “pleased” with the decision.
“It remains our view that cases of this nature, in which individuals place themselves in positions of obvious danger through their own reckless conduct, should not result in the public treasury assuming responsibility for their actions,” he said.
Dibble’s lawyer, Andrew Smiley, said the judges had “overstepped” their authority with the ruling, and plans to appeal.
The accident took place at about 1:30 a.m. on April 23, 2006. Dibble, a former college basketball player, admitted drinking for four hours in an Upper West Side bar before he left to take a downtown train home.
“It wasn’t my choice to lose my leg,” Dibble said last year.
Smiley said his client was “disappointed the court acted outside the scope of what it’s supposed to do,” but is otherwise doing “as great as you can be doing, in spite of his injury.”