Personal Injury & Wrongful Death

Our Atlanta car accident attorneys frequently review cases in which the negligent driver has been distracted while conversing on a cell phone. Recently, the consumer advocacy groups Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety obtained records showing that since 2003, the government has known that drivers talking on their cell phones experience the same potentially deadly distraction whether they are using a handheld device or hands-free technology.

In a press release the groups stated that by keeping this information secret from the public for the past six years, the government has endangered even more lives. Cities and states across the country have passed laws and ordinances requiring drivers to use hands-free phones, mistakenly believing those devices to be safe and encouraging drivers to use them.

According to Public Citizen and the Center for Auto Safety, bBy withholding this data, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) led consumers to believe that it was safe to talk on their cell phones while driving if they kept both hands on the wheel. But these documents show that it is the conversation itself, not the device used to hear it, that causes “inattention blindness,” a cognitive state that slows a driver’s reaction time and limits his ability to detect changes in road conditions.

Many servicemembers and dependents reside in Georgia. While servicemembers can receive care at military hospitals they have no rights if they are the victim of malpractice, no matter how egregious. The Feres Doctrine, named after a 1950 Supreme Court decision, grants complete immunity to military health care professionals who commit malpractice upon service members. Service members who have sacrificed for their country and become victims of malpractice are left to suffer the consequences with no recourse.

This injustice has again come to light in the case of a 20-year-old Air Force serviceman who was reported to be in critical condition at the University of California Davis Medical Center on Monday, after losing both legs in what has been described as complications from routine gallbladder surgery.

The gall bladder surgery was performed at Travis Air Force Base. The Air Force would only comment that a “serious medical incident” occurred at its David Grant Medical Center on July 9 and is being investigated by the base, a national hospital accrediting commission and the U.S. Surgeon General.

According to news reports out of Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday, July 20, a suspect was on the run from the police when he ran a red light striking another vehicle and killing the innocent driver of that vehicle. The newspaper reports said the suspect was fleeing from the police in a stolen vehicle and that when he hit the other car he did so on the driver’s side killing the female driver instantly. The news report indicates that the innocent victim was a female in her early 20’s.

This is yet another case where the police were pursuing a stolen vehicle at high speeds in an urban area where it was foreseeable that an innocent person might be caught up in the chase and seriously injured or killed. We ask the question again: “Was it worth it?” A member of the public wrote to the newspaper following this chase and made the following comments:

“It is really sad that the police are still having these chases. . .if the person is not a murder or something of the sort then why put other citizens in danger by chasing them? You have helicopters, radios and other means of catching them besides high speed chases that end like this one. . .I really wish that the police department would come up with a better way to handle these types of situations.”

We read in the paper about a tragic death which occurred in Pittsburg, Kansas on July 17 of this year. According to news accounts, deputy Sheriffs in Cherokee County, Kansas were pursuing a driver who had committed traffic violations. During the high speed pursuit, the fleeing suspect rear-ended another vehicle on the road resulting in the death of a 13-year old innocent victim. The child’s mother was taken to a nearby hospital but the news accounts released thus far do not indicate the severity of her injuries although losing her daughter obviously is catastrophic.

This news account is typical of many we read these days concerning high speed pursuits. The police continue to chase suspects for minor non-violent offenses. It is foreseeable that during a high speed pursuit a fleeing suspect may run a red light, run out of control or otherwise crash into another vehicle on the road occupied by the innocent. The best way to prevent the death penalty to the innocent is simply to terminate the pursuit.

The only person who has control over the outcome of a high speed pursuit is the professional law enforcement official involved. The suspect is obviously unwilling to be apprehended and is willing to take risks and expose innocent members of the public to the risks they are willing to assume for themselves. The one in control (the police officer) should never let the idiot fleeing driver be in control of the situation. All the police officer has to do is terminate the pursuit if they cannot apprehend the suspect safely. If there are other vehicles on the road at the time of the pursuit and it is clear that the suspect is driving dangerously, the pursuit needs to be terminated so as to prevent serious injury or death to innocent members of the public.

Accutane, a popular, but dangerous, acne drug has been pulled from the U.S. market by its manufacturer, Roche Holdings, a Swiss company. Currently, Accutane is the subject of about 700 lawsuits alleging that the drug caused inflammatory bowel disease. Most of the lawsuits have been consolidated in the courts of New Jersey, where the drug is manufactured by Hoffman -LaRoche, a U.S. subsidary of Roche Holdings.
Inflammatory bowel disease (which is not the same thing as irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS) refers to two diseases that cause inflammation of the intestines, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The diseases have some features in common, but there are some important differences.
Ulcerative colitis is an inflammatory disease of the large intestine, also called the colon. In ulcerative colitis, the inner lining of the intestine becomes inflamed and develops ulcers. Ulcerative colitis is often the most severe in the rectal area, which can cause frequent diarrhea. Mucus and blood often appear in the stool if the lining of the colon is damaged.
Crohn’s disease differs from ulcerative colitis in the areas of the bowel it involves. It most commonly affects the last part of the small intestine and parts of the large intestine. However, Crohn’s disease can attack any part of the digestive tract. Crohn’s disease causes inflammation that extends much deeper into the layers of the intestinal wall than ulcerative colitis. Crohn’s disease generally tends to involve the entire bowel wall, whereas ulcerative colitis affects only the lining of the bowel.
By withdrawing the drug from the U.S. market Roche may be hoping to fuel settlements of the pending lawsuits. Roche has lost the six lawsuits that have gone to trial to date with damages totaling more than 33 million dollars.
The lawsuits allege that Roche failed to warn doctors and patients about the risks of developing inflammatory bowel disease.
Accutane has previously been linked to birth defects and has been removed from the market in 11 other countries.

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According to a report issued by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty jumped twenty percent (20%) during the first six months of 2009. The number of officers killed in traffic related incidents increased seventeen percent (17%) during the first six months of 2009 from 30 to 35 deaths. Of interest is the fact that more officers are killed in the line of duty in traffic related accidents than they are with incidents involving firearms.
We have blogged before about the dangers to the public caused by high speed police chases. Obviously, officers in the line of duty are endangered when they engage in these pursuits. While such pursuits are justified when the offender is dangerous to the public such as a carjacker, armed robber, suspected rapist or murderer, the same cannot be stated for situations involving minor traffic offenders and other non-violent offenses. In short, when the suspected offender has done nothing which is dangerous to the public and thereafter a high speed pursuit ensues at speeds approaching 100 miles per hour, not only is the innocent public endangered by such a pursuit, the officer himself can be endangered as he/she can lose control of their vehicle quite easily at such speeds.
We continue to advocate that high speed pursuits should be limited to those situations where the danger to the public caused by the chase itself is justified by the dangers to the public presented by the suspect. If the danger to the public caused by the chase itself is greater than the need to apprehend a non-violent offender as an example, the pursuit should be terminated. Research and statistics show that if pursuits are terminated, the suspect ceases to flee, shows down and deadly collisions are avoided. Of interest is that crime does not increase in those jurisdictions that have restrictive pursuit policies.

Georgia injury lawyers know that a medical providers failure to diagnose a condition or even mis-diagnose a condition can, and often does, result in the wrongful death of a patient.
A Tennessee state court jury has awarded nearly $24 million to a woman in what is one of the largest medical malpractice verdicts ever in the state of Tennessee. The lawsuit alleged her doctor failed to diagnose a lump that she complained about over the course of 18 months. The lump turned out to be breast cancer.
The Georgia medical malpractice lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP have many years of experience in medical malpractice cases and we are committed to providing personal service and to obtaining fair compensation for all of our clients. Call us at 1-800-228-9159 for a free consultation.

Now that the Obama administration is proposing health care reform, big insurance companies and some doctors associations are attempting to graft so called “tort reform” into the legislation. Georgia residents are already faced with a very restrictive system which affords doctors, hospitals, and other health care professionals with extraordinary protections against lawsuits. Even in the worst cases of malpractice victims are restircted to a recovery for non economic damages of no more than $350,000.00.

The New York Times today ran an excellent guest editorial regarding medical malpractice reform by Tom Baker, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It is posted below:

OUR medical liability system needs reform. But anyone who thinks that limiting liability would reduce health care costs is fooling himself. Preventable medical injuries, not patient compensation, are what ring up extra costs for additional treatment. This means taxpayers, employers and everyone else who buys health insurance — all of us — have a big stake in patient safety.

Our Georgia injury lawyers have represented clients who have suffered injuries or lost loved ones in boating accidents and collisions. Boating accidents usually occur in our area either on a privately owned vessel or on a personal watercraft (jet ski). Some of the causes include:

Boater error

Boater inexperience

A study released by Public Citizen found that medical malpractice payments were at or near record lows in 2008, but suggests the decline almost certainly indicates that a lower percentage of injured patients received compensation, not that health safety has improved.

Medical malpractice is so common, and litigation over it so rare, that between three and seven Americans die from medical errors for every one who receives a payment for any malpractice claim, according to Public Citizen’s analysis of medical malpractice payment data and the best available patient safety estimates.

For the third straight year, 2008 saw the lowest number of medical malpractice payments since the federal government’s National Practitioner Data Bank began tracking such data in 1990. The 11,037 payments in 2008 were 30.7 percent lower than the average number of payments recorded by the NPDB in all previous years.