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Since 2007, there have been seven fatal motorcycle crashes in Westchester County . The vast majority of these Westchester County motorcycle accidents have been caused by two factors: speed, especially around curves, and the rider’s failure to wear helmets. Most recently, this past Sunday, Marco Gomez, a 28 year old man, was killed in Yonkers when he apparently lost control of his bike and was thrown into a chain link fence. Preliminary police investigation has determined that Mr. Gomez was not wearing a helmet and was driving at an excessive speed.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that registered motorcycles climbed to 6.68 million in 2006 from 3.9 million in 1996, with fatal motorcycle accidents increasing to 71.9 per 100,000 riders from 55.8 per 100,000 riders. During that same ten year period, car accident deaths dropped substantially due to increased seat belt usage and the ready availability of air bags in most vehicles.

The Westchester County Police has implemented parkway checkpoints (4 of the 7 fatal accidents have occurred on the County’s winding parkways) in an effort to reduce these tragic accidents. They hope that these checkpoints, in which bikers are stopped to determine if they have the proper safety equipment and documentation, will motivate motorcyclists to enroll in safety programs such as one given by Bob Simpson, owner of the Smart Rider Motorcycle Safety Program. Mr Simpson’s program emphasizes turning properly, as a large percentage of motorcycle fatalities happen on curves, due to speeding, swerving or braking improperly.

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Under a federal plan known as the “287g” program, local legislators including Ron Ball, R-Carmel are seeking to arm local police with the ability to start deportation proceedings against Putnam County illegal immigrants convicted of felonies. Essentially, Ball’s plan is to implement the federal government’s 287(g) program on a statewide basis, by which local police or correction officials would perform deportation duties normally handled by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, known as “ICE.” Advocates of the 287(g) program say that it only targets serious criminals who are in the U.S. illegally and whose immigration status is not discovered until after the arrest. However, opponents of the program are numerous and widespread, including such groups as The Hudson Valley Community Coalition, the Rockland County Immigration Coalition, and the Westchester Hispanic Coalition, who state that the program would destroy trust between police and immigrants and lead to racial profiling.

Damon K. Jones of the Westchester County Corrections Department noted that “involving local law enforcement in illegal immigration will increase the existing poor relationship of law enforcement and the immigrant and minority communities.” Another substantial problem which Mr. Ball will have to confront in attempting to implement his plan is that State and local officials have made clear that they will not take custody of federal detainees.

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This past week, our firm won a significant Westchester County car accident verdict in a case in which Allstate Insurance, as its custom, refused to make a reasonable offer. The case was simple. Our client, a woman in her late fifties, was hit by a car while walking to work and suffered a left hand injury, and other injuries of lesser severity. Allstate knows that attorneys are now fearful to go to trial in Westchester car accident cases, (not to mention slip and fall cases, dog bite cases or product liability cases as well), because Westchester juries tend to be very conservative and favor defendants, either because they think verdicts are too high in general, there are too many lawsuits, or their insurance rates will go up. Additionally, under the No-Fault Law in New York, plaintiffs must meet the “threshold”, which generally means that they must have a fracture, a disfigurement, or some type of permanent injury to recover any compensation. Thus, Allstate, more than any other insurance company, has a practice of forcing plaintiff attorneys to go to trial (Allstate’s strategy is well known and has been posted on various Internet sites) in the hope that plaintiffs won’t sue and lawyers won’t take cases when they see that Allstate is the insurance company for the wrongdoer.

We called Allstate’s bluff, (they offered a measly $10,000) and the jury awarded our client a total verdict of $105,000 for past and future pain and suffering. In addition to the fact that this Westchester auto accident jury taught Allstate the lesson that they will be held accountable when the evidence is there, the other positive development from this case was our experience with the new “Summary Jury Trial Program”, with Judge Gerald Loehr presiding.

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Our personal injury clients in New York slip and fall cases, automobile accidents, various premises liability cases and construction accidents are often contacted within a few days of the accident by “concerned” investigators hired by insurance companies (especially Allstate, State Farm, Progressive, New York Central Mutual and Countrywide) allegedly to “help” them or “assist you in any way we can.” This is insurance code speak for destroy your case before you get a chance to hire a lawyer.

The usual ruse will be that the investigator goes to the residence of the injured person, or that of the neighbor or relative, because he has “important information” for the person who’s been in the accident or needs to speak with them to make sure their case is “handled correctly.” In fact, these duplicitous and deceitful insurance representatives are looking for the following: a way to discredit the person; establish that they are working; find out what kind of work they do; what type of car they drive; or their previous medical history (such as a prior accident or lawsuit) that could be helpful to the insurance company in denying the claim. These “helpful” insurance representatives will go so far as to leave their card with their e-mail and cell phone information that can be accessed 24/7 to be of “extra assistance.”

We represent a client who suffered very serious leg injuries in a Westchester County car accident when an oil company van driver backed up his van in a gas station, knocking down our client, and then rolled over his leg, causing severe injuries. Despite the fact that we were immediately retained to represent our client, weeks after we notified the insurance company of our representation, they unethically sent one of these investigators to our client’s brother’s house, since it was “vital” that they speak with the client to make sure that he was “doing o.k.” Luckily, in our client’s case, the brother sent the lying investigator on his merry way with an admonition never to return, as we had warned our client ahead of time about this practice.

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A study conducted by The National Initiative For Children’s Healthcare Quality, using a new scientific detection method, has determined that for every 100 hospitalized children, there are 11 drug-related harmful events. These include medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses, and bad drug reactions. This new estimate translates to more than 7% of hospitalized children, or approximately 540,000 children annually, based on government data. The new method uses a list of 15 “triggers” on children’s charts, including use of specific antidotes for drug overdoses, suspicious side effects and various lab tests.

The results will be made available to the public in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics. Experts say that the problem is larger than the study concludes, because it only reviewed selected charts, and didn’t include results from general community hospitals, where most U.S. children are treated.

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Supplementing our February 29, 2008 post “Blood Thinner Heparin Tied To Several Deaths“, the actor Dennis Quaid appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday to reveal every parent’s nightmare: He and his wife almost lost their newborn twins last year at Cedar’s Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles due to a massive overdose of the blood thinner Heparin, manufactured by Baxter International.

The nurses were supposed to give the twins a dosage of “Hep-Lock”, a weak form of Heparin to keep IV lines open. Instead, they gave the twins Heparin in a dosage which Quaid described as “10,000 times the normal dosage”, causing a drug overdose which could have been fatal. Apparently the almost tragic mistake was caused by the very similar blue backgrounds on the vials of Hep-Lock and Heparin. Quaid said that “our kids were bleeding from everyplace they were punctured…it was blood everywhere.”

Shockingly, this same event occurred in Indianapolis a year earlier, which resulted in the deaths of three infants. Despite this fact, Baxter International, being sued by the Quaids in a multi-million dollar defective product lawsuit, did not change the colors of the two vials until after the Quaid twins incident–now, one vial is red and the other is blue, making a mistake by nurses much less likely.

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The Journal Archives of Surgery published a study on March 17th which found that a year after an injury in a car accident, slip and fall or other types of accidents, 63 percent reported that they still had substantial pain related to the injury. The over 3,000 patients studied were 18 to 84 years of age, who had survived a traumatic injury.

The people in the study suffered head injuries, broken limbs, chest or abdominal trauma and other injuries in motor vehicle crashes, slip/trip and fall accidents and other circumstances. The most common areas of pain were in the joints and limbs (44 %), the back (26 %), the head (12 %), and the neck (7 %).

The American Pain Foundation, a Baltimore-based advocacy group, said the financial cost of chronic pain in the United States, including lost income, health care expenses and lost productivity in the workplace, is estimated to be $100 billion per year. According to this foundation, back pain is the leading cause of disability in Americans under 45 years old.

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On March 15, 2008, in a fatal New York construction accident, a construction crane collapsed on East 51rst Street in Manhattan, killied seven people and injuring several others. Aides to the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, said they had been told by the Office of Emergency Management that the crane fell on two buildings, destroying one at 305 East 50th Street and partly collapsing the building at 301 East 50th Street. The big white crane which fell appeared to be about 20 stories tall, according to onlookers. Firefighters carried stretchers at the scene of the accident, as people were feared to be trapped beneath the wreckage. Apparently, just before the crane collapsed, it was lifting material that apparently fell and struck a girder that connected the crane to the building.

Construction has increasingly become a deadly business — especially in New York, where laborers routinely dangle from skyscrapers, all part of a building boom that has defied the national slowdown. In January, in another New York fatal construction accident, high-rise concrete forms collapsed at the site of Donald Trump’s hotel and condo complex in Lower Manhattan. An Ukrainian immigrant worker who was the father of several children was decapitated as he plunged 42 stories to his death. Three others were injured.

Two months earlier, another immigrant worker was killed when he fell 15 stories, prompting the creation of a task force to cut down on scaffolding accidents.

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The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services USCIS acknowledged that due to a huge increase in applications for green cards and citizenship in July of 2007, the average waiting time for legal residency and citizenship is now 18 months. The surge in applications in July of 2007 (7 times more than the average month), which resulted in the increased waiting time from approximately 7 months to 18 months, was due to applicants submitting their papers just before the almost 50% increase in fees on July 30, 2007.

The USCIS has been under fire for not anticipating and planning for the huge increase in applications last July, although they did hire 750 additional agents for the sole purpose of working on applications. Michael Aytes, the associate director of domestic operations of USCIS has pledged that the agency will keep its promise made at the time of the increase: that in return for the higher fees, by 2010, applications for U.S. citizenship will be processed within 5 months, and petitions for green cards will be handled within four months.

This writer is somewhat skeptical about these optimistic predictions from the USCIS, but we will give the agency the benefit of the doubt and hope that these 750 extra officers will make the difference once the July 2007 surge in applications is two years behind us.

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Following up on our blog “U.S. Supreme Court Deals Blow to Lawsuits Against Defective Products“, the Court heard arguments on February 25 in Warner-Lambert v. Kent, to determine whether drug manufacturers should receive similar protection from lawsuits that the Court handed out to medical device makers earlier in February. Judge Breyer, normally one of the Court’s most liberal justices, gave a strong indication that the Court is heading in the direction of protecting drug makers when he stated: “Who should make the decisions that will determine whether a drug is on balance, going to save people or, on balance, going to hurt people?… An expert agency, [The Food and Drug Administration] on the one hand or 12 people pulled randomly for a jury role who see before them only the people whom the drug hurt and don’t see those who need the drug to cure them.”

Seemingly forgetting about the thousands of injured victims of Vioxx, for example, who used a dangerous drug which had been approved by the F.D.A. and nevertheless suffered numerous deaths, heart attacks, and other complications, and without question needed the courts to redress their grievances, it appears that the Supreme Court is now ready to bar lawsuits against drug makers.

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