$25 Million Jenny Jones Show Wrongful-Death Verdict Over the Scott Amedure Killing
After trial: The Michigan Court of Appeals later reversed the award.
An Oakland County jury found Warner Bros. and The Jenny Jones Show liable for the wrongful death of Scott Amedure and assessed $25 million, an award the Michigan Court of Appeals later reversed.
What happened
In March 1995, The Jenny Jones Show taped an episode in Chicago built around secret admirers. Scott Amedure, a 32-year-old man from Michigan, was brought on to reveal a crush on an acquaintance, Jonathan Schmitz. Schmitz had been told the admirer might be a woman. On stage he learned otherwise. The segment never aired.
Three days later, Schmitz drove to Amedure's home in Oakland County, Michigan, and shot him with a shotgun. Amedure died at the scene. Schmitz was arrested, convicted of murder, and sent to prison. Amedure was 32 years old and left behind a family in Michigan.
Amedure's mother, Patricia Graves, filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of his estate in Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac. Geoffrey Fieger represented the family. He argued that the producers had engineered the on-air confrontation: they recruited both men, kept Schmitz in the dark about the nature of the surprise, and never screened for his documented history of mental instability and earlier suicide attempts. The suit named Warner Bros. and Telepictures, the show's owner and distributor.
The trial ran from March into May 1999 before Judge Gene Schnelz. On May 7, 1999, the jury returned a verdict for the family and set damages at $25 million. With interest and costs added, the judgment entered against the defendants came to roughly $29.3 million.
The defendants appealed. On October 22, 2002, a divided panel of the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the judgment in a 2 to 1 decision. The majority held that the producers owed no legal duty to protect Amedure from a killing that Schmitz committed three days after the taping and hundreds of miles from the studio. The court ordered judgment entered for the defendants.
The Michigan Supreme Court declined to revive the case. After the appeal, the family recovered nothing on the verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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