Judge Allows Indiana State Fair Victims to Form Class

A federal judge certified all of the victims of the Indiana State Fair concert stage collapse into a single class in a lawsuit challenging a law that caps the state’s liability at $5 million, but she concluded the plaintiffs are unlikely to win the challenge. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker in Indianapolis allows the estates of three of the seven people killed in the Aug. 13 collapse to pursue their federal constitutional challenge to Indiana’s tort claim law, which caps the state’s financial liability at $700,000 per victim and a total of $5 million for all victims.