NEW ORLEANS Full-blown evidence the Nanny State is alive and well has turned up in, of all places, a Louisiana court decision involving a tragic bus crash.

By a vote of 3-2, a panel of appeals court judges upheld a lower court ruling that the Louisiana highway department was as much to blame for the horrible Mother's Day 1999 bus crash near New Orleans as the sick, drugged-up driver who lost control of the coach.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeal judges in the majority said Civil District Judge Rosemary Ledet, in her ruling last year, correctly allotted a 50 percent share of blame to the state and 50 percent to Custom Bus Charters driver Frank Bedell for the May 1999, crash that left 22 people dead and 21 injured.

Bedell was at the wheel when his bus veered off Interstate 610, smashed through a wooden guardrail and went airborne before slamming into the side of a ravine. The coach was on its way to a casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

"We find that the negligence of Mr. Bedell in losing control of the bus, combined with (the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Developments) failure to design, install and properly maintain a safety system capable of redirecting the bus, equally caused the harm to the passengers on the bus," 4th Circuit Judge Edwin Lombard said in an opinion joined by Judges James McKay and Dennis Bagneris.

But Judge Max Tobias wrote that in light of Bedell's health problems and the medication he was on at the time of the crash, the state should shoulder at most 10 percent of fault.

Bedell, 46, a drug user in chronically poor health, died of a heart-related ailment three months after the crash.

The other dissenter, Judge David Gorbaty, said no proof was offered that the state Department of Transportation and Developments guard rail was defective and called holding the agency 50 percent liable for the crash "manifestly erroneous."

"But for the negligence of the bus driver, this accident would not have occurred," he said.

The case could be appealed by the state to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the appeals court has ordered the case returned to Judge Ledet to decide how much in damages to award the plaintiffs in each of the 38 lawsuits spawned by the accident.

The plaintiffs earlier settled with other defendants named in the case, including MCI; Custom Bus Charters; Casino Magic, which paid part of the cost of the bus trip, and a Tenet Health Systems internist who cleared Bedell to continue driving even though he was suffering from congestive heart failure.