Total Injury

The Injury Site blog appears to be very active, but in fact, nobody is really writing the Injury Site blog (injurysite dot com) at all. 

Instead, the entire contents of the Injury Site blog have been scraped from the Total Injury Blog. 

Total Injury has a staff of writers, designers, and developers, including several attorney writers and researchers.  The Injury Site apparently has no such thing, because this blogger has been unable to find a single post on the Injury Site blog that didn’t appear on the Total Injury blog first.  If you’re reading this post on the Injury Site blog, it’s a safe bet that no one at the Injury Site is even READING the blog—otherwise, they’d surely have prevented this post from appearing.

If you’re reading this post on Total Injury, thanks for visiting, and we apologize for the interruption.  We’ll have more timely personal injury news and commentary for you later today.

In a very unusual personal injury lawsuit, 8 year old Teddy Harrison claims his parents failed to buckle his car seat properly before he was thrown from his parents SUV in a car accident.  He was only 3 when he suffered a brain injury and became permanently disabled as a result of the automobile accident that happened in 2001.

Now Teddy is suing his parents with help from his grandmother.  The odd thing is that his parents hope Teddy wins the Minnesota personal injury case because it would force their auto insurance company to pay Teddy $100,000. 

The Minnesota Supreme Court listened to arguments for both sides of the Minnesota personal injury case on Thursday.  The Minnesota Trial Attorneys Association, a network of mostly personal injury attorneys, filed a brief to support Teddy's position.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to change a court ruling made by the Illinois Supreme Court last year in a class action personal injury case against Philip Morris USA.  

The original personal injury lawsuit involved smokers alleging that Philip Morris knew its "light" and "low tar" cigarettes were not really less harmful than regular cigarettes.  In March 2003 an Illinois judge ruled in favor of the smokers and awarded $10.1 billion as a personal injury award. 

The Illinois Supreme Court  overturned the personal injury settlement last year stating that Philip Morris could not be held liable under state law since the Federal Trade Commission allowed the cigarette companies to falsely characterize the cigarettes.

The Delaware Supreme Court denied an appeal by Beebe Medical Center and its insurance carrier for the compensatory damages in the wrongful death case brought by Julie Bailey's family.  Julie Bailey, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease, was released from the Beebe Medical Center in 2003 to the nearby Lewes Convalescent Home and walked directly into a food freezer at the home.  She became trapped and suffered frostbite which led to her death. 

The Delaware personal injury suit originally brought by Ms. Bailey's family went to court in 2005 to argue for both punitive and compensatory damages.  The medical center took responsibility for the negligence and agreed to $5 million in punitive damages.  Beebe then appealed the compensatory damages to the Supreme court arguing that evidence related to the punitive damages should not have been included in the court's consideration for the compensatory damages.  The court upheld the $13 million verdict for the compensatory damages and is the largest ever Delaware personal injury settlement for this type of case.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday from Phillip Morris and lawyers for Jesse Williams' widow, Mayola Williams who was awarded $79.5 million in punitive damages against the tobacco company. The jury originally found Phillip Morris guilty of fraud and negligence for Mr. William's lung cancer.

At the Supreme Court hearing, Ted Boutros argued for the tobacco company, challenging the punitive damages as arbitrary and not allowed by the constitution. He also stated that this award is not fair to future plaintiffs suing Philip Morris.

The lawyer for the Williams family, Bob Peck argues that no other plaintiffs have pursued suits against Phillip Morris since the verdict in 1999 and that a punitive award is intended to deter similar acts of misconduct not necessarily provide satisfaction to the individual plaintiff.

The Supreme Court is expected to make its ruling sometime in July of 2007.

Personal injury cases often hinge on the reaction of juries to the parties, and there's been much controversy about the fact that judges can and often do alter awards entered by juries. While some experts--primarily those in the insurance industry and the personal injury defense bar--have claimed that jurors are unqualified to make determinations in large, complex cases, even they were probably be surprised by the data presented by Professor Nancy King of Vanderbilt University: many jurors fall asleep during trial.

King studied juror misconduct across the twenty-year period from 1796 through 1996, and discovered that sleeping jurors hardly disrupted the trial process these days. According to King, 69% of judges surveyed had encountered at least one sleeping juror during the past three years, and most did not grant mistrials. However, in 85% of the cases, the sleeping juror was dismissed from the case.