Plaintiff Laurence Rothschild claims that he suffered injuries after a slip and fall in a puddle of water at a coin show that was held on a premises owned by the Police Athletic League of Parsippany-Troy Hills (“PAL”). Plaintiff brought a negligence lawsuit against the Township of Parsippany-Troy Hills, PAL and Garden State Coin Stamps Currency Show, Inc. for damages. One of the issues in Rothschild v. Twp. of Parsippany-Troy Hills, 2024 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 372 (App. Div. March 8, 2024) was whether the trial court made a mistake in finding that PAL was entitled to charitable immunity against such claims.
The trial court had dismissed plaintiff’s complaint against PAL, holding that PAL was entitled to charitable immunity without conducting an evidentiary hearing. On appeal, Plaintiff argued that: 1) PAL failed to present sufficient evidence as to its revenue and funding sources to be entitled to charitable immunity; 2) the judge failed to follow his own orders and conduct an evidentiary hearing on the disputed facts; and 3) the judge mistakenly considered financial records provided well after the close of discovery and lacked authentication and attestation based on personal knowledge.
The Appellate Division noted that charitable immunity is an affirmative defense and an entity seeking charitable immunity must establish that: “1) it was formed for non-profit purposes; 2) is organized exclusively for religious, charitable or educational purposes; and 3) was promoting such objectives and purposes at the time of the injury to plaintiff who was then a beneficiary of the charitable work.”
When an entity asserts it is organized for charitable purposes, like PAL was in this case, the court must review its funding sources to determine whether a charitable purpose is being fulfilled. The Court further explained that to aid this inquiry, the entity must provide evidence, “to assist in analyzing its [financial records] and determining funds received from charitable contributions” and specify the fee structure for its programs and services and detail its fundraising efforts with specificity.
Here, three days prior to the scheduled hearing to determine whether PAL was entitled to charitable immunity, PAL presented several years of tax returns and other financial documents to support its claim for such immunity. The Court noted that given these circumstances, Plaintiff lacked sufficient time to review the documents and retain an expert to rebut the information revealed by the financial documents. According to the Appellate Division, the judge should have rescheduled the hearing to give Plaintiffs the chance to do so.
In addition, the Court noted that the judge did not conduct an evidentiary hearing consistent with his own prior orders which robbed Plaintiffs of the opportunity to cross-examine PAL’s witnesses regarding the financial documents. The judge had only heard legal arguments from counsel on the issue of charitable immunity. Lastly, the Court also considered that the documents supplied by PAL were not properly authenticated, as there were no affidavits or certifications based on personal knowledge to authenticate the documents. The Court held that, because Plaintiffs challenged the authenticity and accuracy of these documents, the judge made a mistake in relying upon them to find that PAL was entitled to charitable immunity.
Therefore, the Appellate Division agreed with Plaintiff that the trial court should not have granted PAL charitable immunity based upon the evidence presented and remanded the matter back to the trial court for an evidentiary hearing to resolve the fact disputes about whether PAL was entitled to charitable immunity.