Personal Injury & Wrongful Death

Amid the debate over so called medical malpractice reform, the rights of patients seem to be getting sacrificed for the profit of large insurance companies. A recent report from California demonstrates why the right of patients to redress in courts cannot be curtailed.

According to published reports the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) recently issued administrative penalties to 11 California hospitals, each of which has been “fined $25,000 for alleged regulation violations that caused injury or death to patients. The violations included failures in care, such as leaving sponges or other surgical tools inside patients and failures in communication between hospital departments or inadequate nurse training.
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Many employment lawyers are confronted with hostile environment claims where managers exploit their positions to seek sexual favors from employees working underneath them. Such an employment case obviously involves sexual harassment but is entirely different and generally far less devastating to a victim when a sexual predator is hired by an employer and is allowed to gain access to vulnerable victims through their jobs. As an example, if a mental health facility hires someone unsuitable for a position and that person takes sexual advantage of a mentally ill patient, it can readily be seen that such an occurrence could be extremely devastating to the victim and his or her family. The question is how to best deal with such a situation from a legal standpoint when such a case is brought to the attention of an attorney.
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From newspaper accounts it appears that the Board of Commissioners of Clayton County may conduct an independent investigation into a police chase which resulted in the wrongful death of two innocent women who were returning from bible study when a pickup truck fleeing from a Clayton County police officer slammed into their vehicle on Old National Highway in Atlanta. The deadly pursuit began when the police noticed a suspect allegedly soliciting a prostitute. Even though this is a misdemeanor and a minor offense, Clayton County police officers began a high speed pursuit of the suspect which ended with deadly results. Even though the Clayton County Police Department policy does not allow for high speed pursuits of misdemeanor offenders, nonetheless, the Police Department has publicly come out in defense of its officers claiming that the pursuit was justified under the circumstances.
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The Georgia injury lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP have handled many wrongful death lawsuits where alcohol was a factor in causing or contributing to our client’s death. Some of these cases have involved our representation of a guest passenger who was killed as a result of the negligence of the host driver. Such could have been the case on Friday evening when an Augusta, Georgia man, Earl Clark, died in an accident on Mike Padgett Highway. Clark was the passenger of a 1988 Toyota Camry traveling north on Mike Padgett Highway. The host driver of the Toyota apparently attempted to turn left onto Clark Road and was struck by two vehicles traveling southbound. The southbound vehicles struck the passenger side of Toyota, trapping Clark in the vehicle. After he was extricated by emergency workers, he was taken to the Medical College of Georgia where he was pronounced dead. According to authorities, alcohol could have been a factor in the accident.
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The Georgia injury lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP have sued a number of police departments around the State of Georgia for the wrongful death of innocent citizens caused by police chases. Our experience has shown that following a high speed pursuit, the police begin immediately to plan their defense. We have already seen this in last week’s outrageous police chase in Clayton County. The police have told reporters that the officer had already slowed down “hoping that the fleeing suspect would slow down”. In other words, the police will say, as they always do, that they were not “in pursuit” at the time of the collision. Oh yes, they often contend they had “terminated the pursuit” by the time of the fatal crash. Trying now to put as much distance between the pursuing officer and the crash, they say the officer didn’t even see the collision! I wonder whether the police videotape will bear this out or whether it will mysteriously disappear as it does in so many police chase cases. We see the same lame excuses for bad police conduct over and over. Where was the pursuing police officers supervisor in all of this. Did he radio the speeding officer and tell him to back off or terminate the chase or did he not hear such commands, if made.Will this be another case where the radio was not working properly? In handling many of these police chase cases, we discovered a woman whose own innocent daughter was killed as a result of a police chase case. She has a website which every citizen should check out. http://pursuitsafety.org/index.html She posts the photograph of every innocent victim of police chases. When you see the faces of some of the thousands of innocent victims who have lost their livesas a result of “cowboy” police chases over misdemeanor criminal offenses and traffic offenses, you can see why the Georgia injury lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP feel passionate about these cases.
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Our Atlanta product liability attorneys have represented parents of children killed and seriously injured by dangerous products.

Drawstrings in hooded sweatshirts have been long recognized as a danger to small children. There have been many reports of children strangled after the drawstrings have been accidently caught in various devices. Some of these incidents have resulted in death.

In November 2008, a 3-year-old boy died in Fresno, Calif., when the drawstring on his Hill Sportswear hooded sweatshirt became stuck on a playground set strangling him.
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The Georgia injury lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP have several wrongful death lawsuits pending against various police departments throughout the state. They all involve police chases.They all involve police officers violating their own department policy with respect to police chases. They all involve the wrongful death of innocent victims and several involve the Clayton County Police. Will they ever get the message? Yesterday, Clayton County Police officers saw two men in a pickup truck appear to solicit a known prostitute. When they attempted to detain them, the men took off and the police took off in hot pursuit putting innocent citizens at risk of serious injury or death. During the course of the police chase which began in Clayton County and ended in Fulton County, two innocent women were killed when the fleeing suspects slammed head-on into the women’s car. Is it worth imposing the death sentence on innocent citizens to catch two men who have allegedly propositioned a prostitute? I am sure that the families of the two innocent victims don’t think so and most rational people don’t either. Maybe when the counties employing these officers get hit with large enough verdicts, they will either change their chase/pursuit policies or enforce the ones on the books.
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is again launching an attempt to protect its mega business members at the expense of ordinary U.S. citizens. The Chamber has been at the forefront in attempts to mislead Americans about a multitude of issues which affect millions of people, all to protect the profits of its controlling members. Now, the Chamber is rolling out an advertising campaign of at least $2 million aimed at defeating a central plank of the Obama administration’s financial-regulation overhaul.
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A Florida jury awarded a 92-year-old man over $5.3 million in his wrongful death lawsuit against Phillip Morris, the cigarette maker according to The Miami Herald. The man’s wife died in 1996 at the age of 63 from lung cancer after smoking 2 packs of Marlboro’s a day since she was 16-years of age. The apparent theory of the case was that the tobacco industry, including Philip Morris, misrepresented the risk of smoking in its advertising and knowingly sold a product which was addictive. Notwithstanding the ridiculous 1994 sworn testimony of the tobacco industry CEO’s to Congress that “nicotine is not addictive”, this jury found otherwise.

If you go on Google and take advantage of a tool known as “Google News Alerts,” Google will send to you via e-mail news accounts in which certain terms are used. I typed in today the terms “police chase killed.” The following are headlines received from newspapers across the country which I received from this Google News Alert:

1) Victim In Police Chase Remembered as Caring Mom;

2) Woman Killed In Crash During Oakland Police Chase;

3) Toddler Killed In Police Chase;

4) One Man Dead After Barrie Police Chase;

5) Woman Hurt In Police Chase Speaks Out;

6) Two Year Old Killed In Police Chase;
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