Seong Sil Kim v. New York City Transit Authority is a lawsuit in which a woman who laid down on subway tracks in 2000 in an apparent suicide attempt was first awarded over US$14,000,000 after a train hit her.
[1] On May 3, 2000, Seong Sil Kim lay down on the subway tracks just north of 34th Street on the West Side of Manhattan.
However, Kim's lawyers presented an expert witness who calculated that the operator should have been able to stop his train in time had he been going 10 miles per hour (16 km/h) or less, under an "extreme caution" alert.
Her lawyer, David Dean, of the law firm of Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo, said, "How she got there was less important than the obligations of the operator.
Finally in 2006, a panel of appellate judges ruled 4–1 that there was legally insufficient evidence to support a finding of Transit Authority negligence or to establish which of several possible trains caused Kim's injuries.