Posted by buellerbueller 13 hours ago
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
Is this the first of many to come
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.
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.