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New York Trials are structured differently in Manhattan and Bronx personal injury cases than they are in the remainder of the lower Hudson Valley and other boroughs of New York City. In a New York County construction accident, or a Bronx slip and fall case, for example, there are “full trials”, meaning that all issues are litigated before a jury in the same trial: issues as to the fault of the parties, as well as the injuries suffered by the plaintiff, the treatment performed by the doctors involved and the all damages issues involving the permanency of the injuries.

Conversely, in Queens County, for example, as well as the lower Hudson Valley jurisdictions such as Westchester County, Dutchess County, Rockland County, and Orange County, to use some examples, except in rare instances, trials are “bifurcated.” Bifurcated means split into two parts. So, as an example, in a Westchester County motor vehicle accident, the jury first hears testimony and considers evidence only of the negligence or fault of the parties involved in the car accident, and first makes a decision as to whether the defendant(s) and or the plaintiff are legally responsible for the accident. (For a description of how we prove the defendant’s negligence in a personal injury case, please see our November 13, 2007 blog entitled “Burden of Proof in New York Personal Injury Cases”). It is only if a jury finds the defendant(s) partially or wholly at fault for the accident in a bifurcated trial that a jury then decides the amount of damages to award the plaintiff in a bifurcated case.

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In a joint study by the Fiscal Policy Institute and the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) , there were some interesting and surprising results which may give politicians who are demanding more border control and higher fences some hesitation in making those demands. Specifically, the study found that a typical New York immigrant lives in the United States legally, speaks English well, has attended some college and lives in a home owning family that earns $71,000 per year. The study found that foreign born residents contribute 229 billion into New York’s economy, accounting for 22.4% of the state’s gross domestic product. Other interesting and important findings are as follows: The great majority of the New York suburbs’ immigrant population is in the United States legally; There are approximately 130,000 New York undocumented immigrants, from Westchester and Long Island combined, which make up only 21% of the overall immigrant population in New York; Despite a major focus on day laborers, they comprise less than 1/2 of one percent of the immigrant population in the New York suburbs;
Foreign born employees, legal and illegal, account for 82% of housekeepers, 58% of cooks and almost half of construction workers; importantly, foreign born workers make up 41% of physicians, 28% of professors, and 19% of financial managers–perhaps that statistic should be repeated to Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Hillary Clinton as they fight over who will be the toughest “keeping our borders safe.”

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The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that there will be substantial delays, of at least one year in some cases, in processing citizenship and green card applications. These delays were brought on by two significant events: First, early in 2007, the USCIS announced that fees for all applications would be increased on July 30, 2007. For example, the fee for submission of the N-400 Naturalization application went up 66% from $405.00 to $675.00 on July 30th of this year. As a result of this announcement, applications filed in July and August of 2007 were double that in the same two months in 2006. In all, USCIS received 2.5 million applications in July and August of 2007. The second major development prompting increased filings was the anti-immigration debate in Congress this year, which coincided with the USCIS announcing that they were preparing a more difficult test for aspiring citizens.

As of November 16th, the Texas and Vermont Processing Centers are just now acknowledging receipt of naturalization petitions received in July, 2007. The processing backlogs at present are completely different than those in the past involving immigrants seeking legal residency from countries like Mexico and the Philippines, in which annual limits on green cards have often resulted in delays of several years. The USCIS has announced that with the revenue from increased fees, it will hire 1,500 new employees, an increase of its current staff of 15,000, to assist in clearing the backlog. The goal is apparently to complete naturalization applications submitted this past summer in time for these applicants to vote in the November, 2008 elections.

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November 2007 has been a treacherous month on the Bronx River Parkway in New York. On November 13, 2007, we did a report “Fatal Accident on the Bronx River Parkway…” describing the New York fatal car crash in which a Yonkers couple, Bernard and Phyllis Cecere, was killed when their vehicle was struck by an apparently speeding car driven by 19 year old Justin Martinez near Oak Street in Yonkers.

On November 26, 2007, an Orange County man was killed and a Peekskill woman seriously injured in a nearly head on collision on the Bronx River Parkway just north of the Virginia Road exit. On a curvy section of the roadway heading southbound, Dawn Young was driving a 2004 Jeep Liberty when she apparently crossed the double yellow line, colliding with a 2005 Mazda being driven by Gerald Wolfe, who died from his injuries at Westchester Medical Center. Ms. Young’s injuries are not considered life threatening. This was second fatal accident in the exact same location of the Parkway; back in October of 1999, three people were killed when a carjacking suspect at the wheel of a stolen Cadillac veered onto the southbound side of the Parkway near Virginia Road and struck the vehicle of a Chappaqua couple on their way home from church. Ironically, after several years of delay due to federal government regulations requiring the installation of storm water basins, construction work was scheduled to begin the same day of the most recent fatal car crash to install center barriers from Cemetery Road at exit 23 to Lafayette Avenue at Exit 27. However, work was delayed due to the inclement weather conditions.

The Westchester County Police have indicated that it is too early to determine if alcohol, drugs, the poor weather conditions, or slippery roads were factors in the fatal car accident.

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A subpoena is a command for the person receiving this document to appear in Court or at a deposition, either to give testimony or to bring documents. A failure to comply with the subpoena can result in a financial penalty to the person subpoenaed, or in extremely rare instances, to a short jail stint for contempt. A subpoena “duces tecum” is a Latin term meaning that the recipient must bring documents to Court, or to a deposition in a lawyer’s office. A personal subpoena is a command to appear in Court or a deposition to give sworn testimony. In New York, a frequent use of a subpoena is to command the “non-party deposition” of a witness to an accident.

Our office recently used a non-party subpoena in a Brooklyn slip and fall case, to obtain the testimony of a passerby who observed our client fall, and also noted that landlord had failed to apply salt or sand to the patch of ice where the accident occurred. If a witness is reluctant to become involved in a case, there is often no other alternative to ensure that this person appears in Court other than a subpoena. Years ago, we were involved in a Bronx construction accident in which our client had fallen from a ladder and suffered very serious injuries. A co-worker was aware that he ladder was in very poor condition, but refused to appear in Court voluntarily. Therefore, in order to get this vital testimony before a jury, we were forced to subpoena this witness to Court.

As for the subpoena duces tecum, this is often used to compel medical providers such as hospitals, physicians, physical therapists, or chiropractors to provide their records of treatment of plaintiffs in New York slip and fall accidents, car accident cases, New York medical malpractice cases, defective product cases, or New York trucking accidents, to name a few.

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In New York personal injury cases, such as a Brooklyn slip and fall accident, Bronx motor vehicle accident, or a Westchester construction accident, probably the most important legal procedure in the case before trial is the deposition. In a deposition, also known as an Examination Before Trial (EBT), the parties to a lawsuit, or witnesses to an accident, are placed under oath and asked questions about the accident, the injuries suffered by the Plaintiff, and generally everything they observed on the date of the car accident, trip and fall accident, or fall from a scaffold or ladder, to use a few examples.

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Negligence is a very common term in New York law, but clients are frequently unsure what this term means. Negligence means a lack of reasonable care which one person owes to another person. It is failing to foresee or anticipate that the wrongdoer’s risky conduct will cause injury to another. Negligence is not intentional or willful conduct, which also creates liability and can lead to legal responsibility for injuries caused. In order to recover personal injury damages in New York however, not only must negligence be proven, but it must also be proven that this negligence was the legal cause of injury or damages to another person.

Specific examples of New York negligence include: A driver causing a Brooklyn car accident by going through a traffic light; a landlord causing a Bronx slip and fall accident on an icy staircase by failing to apply sand, salt or otherwise remove the ice despite his knowledge of the condition; an owner of a dog allowing a Westchester dog bite when the dog had bitten a child one week earlier.

Negligence is not intentional or willful conduct, which also creates liability and can lead to legal responsibility for injuries caused. Examples of intentional conduct would be an assault at a bar, or libel, in which the wrongdoer intends to cause the injury, rather than accidentally causing the injury.

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Faced with vigorous opposition by Republicans and Democrats alike, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has abandoned his plan to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants a scant two months after his initial proposal. Governor Spitzer’s original idea was to abandon New York’s policy of requiring a social security number as a component of obtaining a driver’s license, in order to encourage illegal immigrants to become better trained drivers and obtain car insurance to protect the public.

The irony is that even immigrant rights advocates opposed the more recent version of the driver’s license plan, which would have created three different types of licenses, with immigrants entitled only to a license which could not be used for i.d purposes. They argued that illegal immigrants would “never come out of the shadows” to obtain the lesser form of driver’s license, and that authorities would take advantage of the new policy by reporting the presence of the undocumented immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security.

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The Statute Of Limitations In New York is a legal term which means the time in which a lawsuit must be started to be legally sufficient. In New York State, there are numerous statutes of limitations for various different types of cases. For example, in New York motor vehicle accident cases, the statute of limitations is three years from the date of the accident. This means that even if the case is filed one day past the three year anniversary of the motor vehicle accident in New York, the case is legally defective and will be dismissed.

In New York medical malpractice cases, there is more than one type of statute of limitation, but a classic example of a doctor performing surgery on the wrong body part would have a statute of limitation of two and one half years from the date of the last treatment with that doctor.

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Britney Spears latest run in with the law in which she went through a red light and made an illegal left turn with her children in the car highlights two significant safety issues, one of which we wrote about in our April 8, 2007 blog. Namely, New York mothers driving while intoxicated with their children in the car. A video taken by TMZ.com videographers shows Ms. Spears going through a red light at a well known dangerous intersection in Los Angeles with her two young sons sleeping in the back and her court-appointed monitor in the front. Although on this occasion, Ms. Spears has not been charged with intoxication as part of her traffic offenses, her troubles with drugs, alcohol and vehicles are well documented.

The other issue is New York drivers disregarding traffic signals and routinely going through stop signs and red lights. More and more in this age of people in a hurry to get to their next destination, drivers treat traffic signals like inconvenient nuisances rather than part of the New York Vehicle & Traffic Law. For example, our office in White Plains is one block east of the intersection of Mamaroneck Avenue and Post Road. This intersection has a huge no left turn sign above the traffic lights, which drivers seemingly disregard at will, despite the fact that the intersection has been the site of multiple accidents over the years, and the frequent police presence from the City of White Plains Police Department.