Roberts v. Rigdon Marine — A Mutiny Offshore Angola & a Jones Act / Unseaworthiness Verdict Affirmed

A master moved across to bring a crew back to standard.

Bobby Roberts, Jr. was an experienced ship’s master. Rigdon Marine hired him to captain the Bienville, one of two sister supply vessels stationed off Angola to service the drilling rigs working that country’s offshore oil fields. Both boats ran mixed crews of Americans and Angolans.

Reports had reached Rigdon that the Iberville — the Bienville’s sister ship — had a discipline problem: drug use, drinking, and fighting aboard, all against company policy. Rigdon’s marine superintendent in Angola asked Roberts to move over to the Iberville and replace its captain, in the hope that he could bring the crew back in line. To make that assignment safer, the superintendent promised to remove the troublemakers from the boat. That promise was never kept.

Three flashpoints in twenty-four hours.

The outgoing captain resisted handing over command, and within a day the crew’s unruliness boiled over. A crewman who had gone ashore without permission came back drunk and disrespected an Angolan crew member; the Angolan crew nearly rioted, and Roberts defused it only by promising to put the offender off the boat in the morning.

Later, when Roberts came to the bridge door, a crewman confronted him — “You’re not the captain, you die; you die now” — drew a knife, and beat him with his fists. Roberts broke free and locked himself behind the bridge doors to call for help. As angry crew gathered outside, the former captain disobeyed Roberts’s direct order and opened a locked door, letting them in. They beat and kicked him and sent him down a stairway with four men on top of him. He was left bleeding, disoriented, and in fear for his life. Despite his visible injuries, two days passed before he was taken to a doctor.

The beating left lasting harm: two herniated discs, thoracic outlet syndrome, a concussion-type syndrome, post-traumatic headaches, and chronic depression, anxiety, and memory problems.

The same facts, proved two independent ways.

An owner’s ignorance of one assailant’s character is no defense when the whole crew was the hazard.

Roberts sued in Texas state court — which, under the saving-to-suitors clause, can hear a Jones Act and general-maritime case while applying federal maritime law. His case ran on two separate tracks, and either one could carry it.

The first was Jones Act negligence. An employer must use ordinary care to provide a reasonably safe place to work and a fit crew, and Rigdon’s own decisions supplied the negligence: it knew the Iberville’s crew had been drinking, using drugs, and fighting against policy — that was the very reason Roberts was sent — yet it failed to remove the unruly crew or enforce its rules, and then delayed his medical care. The Act also reaches the crew’s conduct through vicarious liability, and under the Jones Act’s “featherweight” causation standard the employer’s negligence need only have played any part, even the slightest, in the injury.

The second track was unseaworthiness. A vessel owner owes an absolute, non-delegable duty to furnish a seaworthy ship with a competent crew — a no-fault warranty that does not depend on what the owner knew. A crew that is unfit, or an assault by a crew member with a savage and vicious disposition, can render a vessel unseaworthy, and an attack or threat with a dangerous weapon is enough on its own. The owner’s lack of knowledge about a particular assailant is no barrier to that claim.

The appeal came down to two instructions the defense didn’t get.

Much of the appeal turned on the jury charge. Rigdon had asked the trial court to add two instructions: one telling the jury it was not liable for an assault unless the assault was foreseeable, and another requiring proof that an assailant had a “savage disposition.” The trial court refused both and submitted the case on the well-settled Fifth Circuit Pattern Jury Charges.

The appellate court agreed that was right. The foreseeability instruction misstated the law as to vicarious liability — where no proof of foreseeability is required — and it ignored Roberts’s direct-negligence theory entirely. The savage-disposition instruction left out that an attack with a dangerous weapon is itself an extraordinary assault that makes a ship unseaworthy, so it could have misled the jury into the wrong result. Pattern charges that already state the law correctly, the court held, should not be dressed up with a party’s embellishments.

A verdict built on capacity, not just wages.

The jury awarded Roberts $1,505,000, including $1,150,000 for lost future earning capacity. The Court of Appeals affirmed in full in 2008, and the Texas Supreme Court denied review the following spring. With post-judgment interest, the firm’s recovery in the matter was $1,752,767.

Recovery: $1,752,767 (jury verdict $1,505,000, affirmed, plus post-judgment interest) · attorney’s fees $788,745.35 · case expenses $49,603.52 · Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome.

The earning-capacity award held up even though Roberts had returned to some work, because the law measures earning capacity, not only wages actually lost. The evidence showed he could no longer command the larger vessels he had captained before — a drop from roughly $149,000 a year to about $102,000 — and a jury could reasonably build the award from that gap across his remaining working years. The case was tried by Michael P. Doyle, now of Doyle Dennis Avery LLP.