## Facts

- Law enforcement pursued Ortega, an armed suspect, in a high-speed chase.
- During the pursuit, officers in the area established a roadblock using improvised spike devices near a highway within Grand Teton National Park.
- Bassett and another motorist were driving toward and through the roadblock area and encountered officers, but were not warned about the approaching suspect or the danger posed by the pursuit and roadblock.
- Officers allowed plaintiffs’ vehicle to proceed past/through the roadblock area.
- Shortly thereafter, Ortega, traveling at very high speed, collided with plaintiffs’ vehicle, injuring them.
- Plaintiffs sued state and county law-enforcement defendants (and others in the trial court) for negligence in continuing/conducting the pursuit, failing to warn motorists, and operating the roadblock/spikes.
- At trial, the court ruled Ortega’s conduct was willful and wanton and excluded his conduct from the comparative fault allocation, resulting in fault being apportioned only among the governmental defendants.
- The governmental defendants appealed, challenging the exclusion of Ortega from comparative fault and related jury-instruction rulings.

## Issues

1. Whether Wyoming’s comparative fault statute requires a jury to compare a fleeing suspect’s willful and wanton conduct with law enforcement’s alleged negligence when allocating fault for plaintiffs’ injuries.
2. Whether the trial court erred by instructing the jury in a manner that prevented consideration of the suspect’s causal role and fault in the apportionment calculus.

## Decision

- The Wyoming Supreme Court reversed the judgment for plaintiffs and remanded for a new trial.
- The court held the trial court erred by excluding Ortega’s willful and wanton conduct from the comparative fault allocation.
- On remand, the jury must be permitted to consider Ortega as an actor whose conduct may be a legal cause of the injuries and to apportion fault among all relevant actors, including Ortega.

## Legal Principles

- Wyoming comparative fault requires apportionment among all actors whose culpable conduct legally caused the injury, consistent with the statute’s broad definition of “fault.”
- “Fault” for comparative apportionment includes willful and wanton conduct; it is not limited to ordinary negligence.
- Excluding an intentional or willful-and-wanton tortfeasor from the fault allocation risks imposing that actor’s share of responsibility on other defendants, contrary to proportional-liability objectives and the statutory rejection of joint and several liability.
- Proper jury instructions in multi-actor injury cases must allow the factfinder to evaluate causation and assign percentages of fault to each causal actor within the comparative fault framework.

## Conclusion

The court required that a fleeing suspect’s willful and wanton conduct be included in Wyoming comparative fault apportionment and ordered a new trial because excluding the suspect improperly distorted causation and percentage fault allocation among the parties.


Bd. of Cnty. Comm’rs of Teton Cnty. v. Bassett, 8 P.3d 1079 (Wyo. 2000)