Josh Hancock Saga

I haven’t written much about baseball this year. The Cardinals have not played well but have recently shown signs of life. I haven’t been following it as closely as I normally do for some reason.

One sad story that I have paid attention to is the tragic death of Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock. Hancock, 29 years old, was a middle reliever who played a key role in the Cards World Series run last year. In the wee hours of the morning on April 29th Hancock crashed his SUV in to a parked tow truck whose driver was assisting a stalled motorist.

It turns out that Hancock was well over the legal alcohol limit (almost double), using a cell phone, and speeding. Marijuana was found in the vehicle as well.

Today, The Sporting News is reporting that Hancock’s father, Dean Hancock, has filed a suit against Mike Shannon’s restaurant (where Hancock had been drinking), Patricia Shannon Van Matre (restaurant manager), the tow truck company and the stalled motorist.

Without a doubt, Mr. Hancock is dealing with overwhelming grief. However, it is also clear that Josh Hancock was acting irresponsibly.

Looking at the list of defendants, I think it would be hard to put a case together against the stalled motorist and tow truck company. I don’t know all the details of the incident but I would think that it would not be to difficult to convince a jury that Hancock could have avoided the wreck had he not been impaired, occupied with a cell phone and over the speed limit.

It’s common for lawyers to take a scatter shot approach in these lawsuits and go after everyone involved and then narrow it down to the ones who could actually have some culpability.

There have been a number of cases, in Missouri, where the establishment that served a drunk driver was held responsible. Although, usually these are cases in which other people than the drunk driver were killed.

Added to all of this uncomfortable business is the fact that Mike Shannon is a St. Louis icon. He played for the Cardinals and has been a broadcaster for the teams for many years. Shannon himself has been known to tip a few and that fact has made him the butt of many good natured jokes over the years. You could almost compare him to Ed McMahon in that respect. I have never met Shannon but he seems like a good guy and that is, I think, how most people in the area perceive him. He’s the kind of guy you’d like to sit and have a couple of beers with.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. I don’t think it will play well in the court of public opinion, at least, in St. Louis. Also, it smacks of the type of lawsuit where the real object is to glean a settlement.

On a whole different subject, it seems that I am not the only one that doesn’t feel all warm and fuzzy about Google’s quest for omniscience. This is from the Financial Times.

The Article 29 working party, a group of national officials that advises the European Union on privacy policy, sent a letter to Google last week asking the company to justify its policy of keeping information on individualsâ€™ internet searches for up to two years.

The letter questioned whether Google had â€œfulfilled all the necessary requirementsâ€ on data protection.

The data kept by Google includes the search term typed in, the address of the internet server and occasionally more personal information contained on â€œcookiesâ€, or identifier programs, on an individualâ€™s computer.

Standard search information is kept about everyone who uses the search engine, and privacy groups are concerned that even this ostensibly non-personal data can be used to identify individuals and create profiles of their political opinions, religious beliefs and sexual preferences.

So, the EU thinks two years is too long to hold the data. What would be an acceptable period? What happens to the data after two years? It’s kind of nice to know that the EU wants to protect our political opinions, religious beliefs and sexual preferences tough. Thanks for that EU.

Google says that they need to keep the data for “security purposes” rather than a quest for world domination or the future of advertising revenue.