-Caveat Lector- Fairly good article on a court case of interest to anyone who believes in personal responsibility for one's own actions. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/10/national/10TRIA.html April 10, 2001 Court Stories: Seeking Justice After a Fatal Spin of the Cylinder By WILLIAM GLABERSON NDIANA, Pa. — There was one round in the cylinder. It was prom night at Marion Center High School in rural western Pennsylvania. Sean Miller was a senior, but he was not going to the dance. He and Carl Kellar, a ninth grader, were with Leila Dudek, another freshman; the three were listening to one CD over and over again in Carl's tiny basement bedroom. They were the only ones in the house. Early in the evening Carl went upstairs, grabbed the keys from where they were hidden on top of the family's gun cabinet and took out his father's .357 Magnum. It was Sean who first spun the cylinder of the revolver, put the eight-inch barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. Much later he would admit he took no chances because he could see where the cartridge with the bullet landed in the cylinder after each spin. That spring night came alive at a civil trial here last month that told an unusually detailed story of guns and teenage bluster. The trial came and went with little notice in this small town 60 miles east of Pittsburgh. But in a simply furnished courtroom here it raised the kinds of moral questions with no easy answers that are often on the dockets of courts across America. The Russian roulette was a performance of sorts for the benefit of Leila. "I was just trying to impress her," Sean testified. She testified, too. "It went click," she said. She was terrified, she said. Sean spun the cylinder and put the gun to his head again. Click. He spun it again. This time he handed the revolver to Carl, who, Leila testified, could not see the back of the cylinder. It was a dare, she said. "It looked," she told the jurors, "like he was gesturing for him to do the same thing." Then she heard the blast. Every day in courtrooms across the country, people grapple with the endless variety of human evil, nobility, error, stupidity and bravery. Because the oath to tell the truth is taken seriously by some people in courtrooms, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns, courtroom battles can offer unusually clear snapshots of American life — even the parts that stubbornly defy explanation. For four days in March in the Court of Common Pleas of Indiana County, a jury heard the civil suit of Carl's mother, Patricia A. Kellar, against Sean T. Miller, who is now 23. In Judge Gregory A. Olson's courtroom, the crack of that revolver was described so many times it seemed almost to break the silence of the two families facing off. The suit claimed Sean was negligent in prodding Carl to his death on May 26, 1995. In court, the Kellars' lawyer, Victor H. Pribanic of White Oak, Pa., said Sean "took the life of Carl Kellar as surely as if he had pulled the trigger himself." But Sean's lawyer, W. Alan Torrance Jr. of Pittsburgh, said the case hinged on "personal responsibility." Sean did a "dumb thing" that night, he said, but it was Carl who had pulled the trigger that final time. The suit asked for millions of dollars in damages. But a few days before the trial began, Mrs. Kellar, who is 39, said she wanted as much as anything to unravel the mysteries of that night. Sean and Leila lied at first about the events leading up to Carl's death, so she was left struggling with confusion as well as loss. "I'd like to know what happened that night," Mrs. Kellar said a few days before the trial, sitting next to her husband, John, in their modest ranch house where their son had died. During questioning by the state police the night of the shooting, Sean and Leila left out any mention of Russian roulette. After they had all looked at the gun, they said, Carl had suddenly and inexplicably shot himself. Sean Miller was never charged with a crime. So when the trial began on March 19, it became something of an inquest into the teenage world that is hidden from parents. It also shed light on corners of a story that for six years had remained dark. As the older of the two, Mr. Pribanic argued, Sean had power over Carl. Ms. Dudek testified, "Sometimes he got real bossy with him." Mr. Pribanic called Mr. Miller to the stand. Now a square-jawed young man with darting blue eyes, he simmered as Mr. Pribanic led him through a series of admissions. Yes, he had lied to the police that night. "I was afraid of what people were going to think" if they concluded he had provoked Carl to point the gun at his head. Yes, he had asked Leila to lie, too. The police had received anonymous phone calls after Carl's death saying that Mr. Miller had played Russian roulette before. They had called him in for another interview a month later. Then he admitted that he had spun the cylinder and pulled the trigger too that night; that he had begun the game. Mr. Miller told the jurors he had watched where the round was before he had pulled the trigger. "I assumed he would catch onto what I was doing," he said of Carl. But "it didn't cross my mind that he was going to do that." Then Mr. Pribanic asked Mr. Miller to recall for the jurors what he had said about Carl in pre- trial testimony. He had called him "the kid" and had suggested he would "follow me around like a dog." There were a lot things he had said that he wished he could change, Mr. Miller told the jurors. As the central witness in the case, Sean Miller was an enigma. He was clearly furious to be defending a lawsuit but inexplicably cool as a witness. His fingers never trembled and his voice was always firm. "Somewhat cocky," one of the jurors, Wendell Marsh, would say later in an interview. Mr. Miller never said he was sorry his friend had died. "I don't think he has a lot of conscience involved," another juror, Marian Urish, would say. When he was not on the stand, Mr. Miller sat in the front row, often with his mother. While seated in front of the jurors, the two clasped hands almost every minute. Sometimes they were joined by his father, who owns a construction company, and his brother, Josh, a college student. Behind the Millers sat a gray-haired man from their homeowners insurance company, which would have to pay any verdict up to the policy's limit of $100,000. In a courtroom with few strangers, his presence was never explained to the jurors. On the other side of the courtroom, in the front row, Mrs. Kellar sat. Usually, she was with her husband, a machine operator at a coal mine, who had adopted her two children from an earlier marriage. Carl's sister, now 23, and her husband, were with them, and behind them, sometimes as many as a dozen family members. In the hallways of the quiet courthouse, the Millers and the Kellars shunned each other. Inside the courtroom, Mr. Pribanic, a former Pittsburgh prosecutor, sketched the Sean of six years ago as a sinister 17-year-old who used a dangerous image to manipulate younger friends. He called two wiry young men, now 21 and 22, who had been Carl's classmates. They testified that shortly before the night Carl died, Sean had cajoled them to play Russian roulette with his father's revolver. When they refused, one of the young men, Richard L. Smith, testified, Sean made a macabre counteroffer, saying, "Why don't we point it out toward the field and act as if it were us in front of the bullet." Mr. Miller told the jurors that conversation had never happened. But he admitted he had slipped the pins out of the hinges of his father's gun cabinet, removed a revolver and shot into the field that afternoon. As described by witnesses, Carl was a young man with ambition: a high school football player who was in R.O.T.C. He was interested in the Air Force. Though he was almost six feet tall, he had written in a school essay just before he died that he wished to be bigger so that he could have had a chance of playing football at Penn State. "For a car," he wrote, "I want a Corvette." But the dead boy, like the one who lived, did not escape the attacks that are part of legal battle. Mr. Torrance dwelled on the fact that Carl had had his own guns and a hunting rifle, as many boys around here do, as well as a bow and arrow and a collection of knives. Sean's younger brother Josh testified that Carl was a daredevil dirt-bike rider and said he had once seen him courting danger by "car surfing," riding on the roof of a moving vehicle. Mr. Torrance brought in an adolescent psychiatrist, David R. Burns of Philadelphia, to say that Carl might have been a certain type of high-risk adolescent boy who believe "that the dangers they know about don't apply to them." Just after noon on Thursday, March 22, the case went to the jury — seven men and five women from this county where coal mining dominated for decades. Guns here, as in much of America, are not a political issue, they are a part of life. When Judge Olson asked 34 potential jurors whether they or family members had firearms at home, only one did not raise her hand. Four hours after they began deliberations, the jurors sent a note inquiring about a question on the verdict form that asked whether Carl "knowingly and voluntarily accepted the specific risk that caused his death." If they answered "yes," Carl's family would lose. Later, jurors would say they had been divided six to six on that threshold question. At that moment, each side could still have won. Mr. Pribanic said the jurors unnerved him partly because they did not glance over at Mrs. Kellar. After they had left the courtroom, he went in search of Mr. Torrance and the gray-haired man from the insurance company. When he found them in the court's law library, he said later, they seemed as rattled as he was by the jurors' question. The gray-haired man, he said, was already on the phone to the insurance company asking for authorization to settle the case. Court filings show that before the trial the company had offered $100,000. Both sides agreed to keep the new settlement offer secret. But other lawyers said that under the circumstances of the case it was probably only modestly more than $100,000. After six years of waiting, the settlement was reached in an instant. But it happened so fast that the jurors completed their deliberations first, three of them said in interviews. Sean was negligent, their verdict would have said. He had helped cause Carl's death. But Carl was more at fault, 70 percent responsible for his own death, the jurors found, for pulling the trigger. Had the jurors delivered their verdict, the Kellars would not have collected damages. "They were both responsible for what happened," said Nolan Blystone, a juror. When it was over, the Millers sat in the hall. In obvious relief, Sean and his brother shared some private joke. Sean smiled widely, looking boyish for the first time in a week in court. Mrs. Kellar was subdued about the settlement her lawyer had advised her to accept. "I learned more than what I knew" about what happened that night, she said. Out in the hall after six years, the two families still did not speak to each other. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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