Stop Predatory Gambling

Indiana Supreme Court Exempts Casinos from State Common Law

by spgadmin

Yesterday the Indiana Supreme Court ruled against a woman who said a riverboat preyed on her gambling addiction. Jenny Kephart of Nashville, Tenn., filed a lawsuit against Caesars Indiana in 2007 after the Ohio River casino near Louisville, Ky., sued her to recover $125,000 that she had lost in a single night of gambling in 2006. The casino is now Horseshoe Southern Indiana.

Kephart said the casino enticed her to gamble with free meals and rooms, and money on credit. It even sent a car to drive her from Tennessee to Indiana, she said.

“The existence of the voluntary exclusion program suggests the legislature intended pathological gamblers to take personal responsibility to prevent and protect themselves against compulsive gambling. The legislature did not require casinos to identify and refuse service to pathological gamblers who did not self-identify,” wrote Justice Robert Rucker.

Justice Brent Dickson dissented, saying that casinos still have a common-law obligation to protect their customers.

“Nowhere in Indiana’s statutory system of gambling regulation is there any provision that expressly or unmistakably abrogates Indiana’s common law requiring business operators to exercise reasonable care for the safety of their customers and subjecting them to accountability in damages for failing to do so,” Dickson wrote.

Unless, according to the Court’s majority, those business operators have partnered with government to profit from the most predatory business in America, a practice which is costing America’s taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, regardless of whether they gamble or not.