That PADI Liability Release: Win One

Two years ago this month, the dive guides from the Cool Aqua Sun Sports shop at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Rose Hall Jamaica instructed the divers and guests, without appropriate supervision, to dive in the water and descend along a rope line attached to a floating buoy. The bottom, they said, was 50-70 feet deep.

Brian Schiner, 43, of Glenelg, Md., a certified diver, was the first diver in the water. He unknowingly descended to 160 feet and, when he realized how deep he was he quickly ascended. When he surfaced, apparently in serious trouble, the crew failed to give him oxygen, and there was no recompression chamber nearby. Schiner was airlifted from Jamaica to Mercy Hospital in Miami and treated there, but he remains paralyzed.

The Ritz-Carlton initially claimed erroneously that the dive operator was a separate company. They said Schiner was negligent for descending too deep. But Schiner's attorney, Stuart Z. Grossman of Miami, negotiated a $17.5 million settlement in November.

Grossman told Undercurrent that Schiner had signed a PADI release, but it had been improperly executed.