Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

Most of you have probably heard of the saying “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Maryland can now try out a new version of that old adage, which is “Where the water turns green, it’s probably Fort Detrick.”

For those of you who don’t know, Fort Detrick is a military base in Frederick County, Maryland. As of right now it is the headquarters for the United States Army Medical Research Division, but it also had the rather dubious distinction of being the headquarters for our biological weapons research during and after World War II.

The various bits of detritus that came from years of biological weapons research and years of medical research ended up being tossed unceremoniously in a few landfills on the grounds of the Fort, which resulted in the whole area being placed on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list. This has also allegedly resulted in the immediate surrounding area being known as a “cancer cluster,” which is what you call any area where there is a higher than normal cancer rate among the residents. It turns out that waste of any kind has a tendency to seep into the soil on which it is tossed. So while the folks at Ft. Detrick might have thought that simply placing a fence around a few acres of toxic waste might be enough to keep the surrounding environment safe from pollution, it is apparent that they did not consider the effects that groundwater pollution would have on the people who live in the surrounding areas.

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By now, everyone has heard about all of the crashes, injuries and recalls involved with Toyota over the past year. Practically every model that Toyota has out on the market in multiple model years has been subject to a recall. The recalls involve defective braking systems, bad steering, and stuck acceleration systems.

Far from being theoretical, these defects have caused very real harm to innocent people, most notably the Saylor family, who were killed in San Diego when their Lexus suddenly accelerated, and Kuoa Fong Lee, who spent years in prison for vehicular manslaughter after the accelerator on his Toyota Camry got stuck. That resulting accident killed three people.

As long as cars are designed and built by human beings, there will always be flaws. The most important element of car defects is how responsible the car company will be when the flaw is discovered. Will they own up and initiate the recall and make the repairs, or will they try to hide the fact that the flaws exist? In the case of Toyota, it appears that they did the latter.

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A word on frivolous lawsuits: They exist.

Nobody in their right mind could claim that they don’t. Does everybody remember Roy Pearson, the D.C. judge who sued a dry cleaner for $54 million over a pair of lost pants? Or what about Jonathan Lee Riches? This inmate in Lexington, Kentucky who has filed over 3,800 lawsuits over the past few years. He has sued New England Patriots Coach Bill Bellichik, American Idol judge Simon Cowell (and his fiancé,) Somalian pirates, Plato, Bernie Madoff, and basically everyone who happens to garner any bit of media attention, no matter how big or small. The charges against this diverse group of defendants include “hurting my feelings” and “offending me.”

As you probably know by now, Judge Pearson’s lawsuit was not successful, and all of Mr. Riches’ suits get dismissed out of hand, as well they should have. Those suits are supremely ridiculous and a waste of time. But inevitably, these two folks serve as the poster children for tort reform groups. Their absurd (and ultimately unsuccessful) lawsuits are trotted out and given much more airtime and column inches than they deserve, mainly because corporate interests want you to believe that the vast majority of lawsuits belong in the same category as Mr. Riches or Judge Pearson’s. They are most assuredly not.

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There are gubernatorial elections going on in quite a few states this year, but the debate between the two major candidates for Governor of Georgia caught our eye recently. The two candidates were on different sides of everything, which was not at all surprising. But we quite liked one particular quote from Democratic Party candidate Roy Barnes on the subject of tort reform:

"I find it somewhat ironic that we say that jurors - drawn from registered voter rolls - don't have enough sense to decide a case of damages. But, they do have enough sense to decide who is president, governor or even who has the very breath of life taken from them in a criminal case."

 That is a point that is not brought up very often, which is a shame because we believe it to be a good one. Medical Malpractice Damage caps (which are essentially artificial and arbitrary limits placed on the amount of financial compensation that a victim of medical malpractice can receive) completely negate the judgment and intelligence of juries, who are trusted enough to vote in officials and put people to death, yet they are not to be trusted with a fair estimate of exactly how badly a human being has suffered.

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There are gubernatorial elections going on in quite a few states this year, but the debate between the two major candidates for Governor of Georgia caught our eye recently. The two candidates were on different sides of everything, which was not at all surprising. But we quite liked one particular quote from Democratic Party candidate Roy Barnes on the subject of tort reform:

"I find it somewhat ironic that we say that jurors - drawn from registered voter rolls - don't have enough sense to decide a case of damages. But, they do have enough sense to decide who is president, governor or even who has the very breath of life taken from them in a criminal case."

 That is a point that is not brought up very often, which is a shame because we believe it to be a good one. Medical Malpractice Damage caps (which are essentially artificial and arbitrary limits placed on the amount of financial compensation that a victim of medical malpractice can receive) completely negate the judgment and intelligence of juries, who are trusted enough to vote in officials and put people to death, yet they are not to be trusted with a fair estimate of exactly how badly a human being has suffered.

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There has been an important development in the ongoing Toyota recall story. According to ABC News:

An arbitrator has ruled that a former top Toyota attorney turned whistleblower can submit internal Toyota documents in court in order to prove his claim that the company asked him to hide evidence of product defects from the public. Dimitrios Biller, former managing counsel for Toyota, handled product liability suits for the automaker, and claims it regularly hid evidence of safety defects from regulators and the public. As part of a "civil racketeering" suit against Toyota, Biller had sought to place into evidence what he claims are four boxes full of internal Toyota documents that will show he was asked to hide facts from plaintiffs during product liability lawsuits.

This is incredibly significant. As we have learned from reports of various plaintiffs’ attorneys who have been attempting to read the data off of the so-called “black boxes” that exist in Toyota vehicles, this corporation makes every effort to hide behind trade secrecy laws. In other words, they are often allowed to claim that providing crucial evidence would somehow allow others to view and co-opt their technology, which keeps attorneys for the injured from getting crucial evidence needed to prove their case. Toyota’s resistance to Mr. Biller’s requests to provide these documents to the court serves as a perfect example.

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While we certainly don’t support the idea of cameras everywhere, we wholeheartedly support the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s decision to place cameras in Metro buses. These cameras will not be put in place to keep an eye on the passengers. Instead they will be there to record the drivers.

According to the story in The Washington Post:

“The new camera system focuses on drivers and activity outside the buses, transit officials said. The cameras record constantly during bus operations, and when a driver makes any extreme movement -- such as turning the bus sharply or braking or accelerating quickly -- the cameras capture the eight seconds before the incident and the four seconds after. The video and audio of the incident are then automatically downloaded wirelessly from the bus.”

If anybody needed this monitoring system, it would be the WMATA. Bus drivers in the Washington Area have a less than stellar driving record. Over the past few years there have been several high profile bus accidents involving injuries and fatalities, which is not something that should be considered normal in a public transit agency.

Just consider these incidents that have occurred in the past few years:

On Valentine’s Day in 2007, Martha Schoenborn and Sally McGhee were hit and killed by a Metro Bus on the corner of Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The two Alexandria residents had the right of way in the crosswalk.

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Some large corporations have a tendency to behave with ignorance when it comes to the internet. You might be wondering how this could possibly be the case, since every large corporation uses the internet for most of its marketing and customer communication. But what we mean is that they behave in ignorance after they get caught trying to sneak past regulations or obligations.

Here is a rather high profile example: Between 2007 and 2008, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. All of a sudden, most of our favorite shows were put on hiatus in the middle of the season because there was nobody to write them. Nobody was writing sketches for Saturday Night Live or jokes for Jay Leno. Nobody was writing episodes of The Office or Days of Our Lives. For all intents and purposes, scripted entertainment stopped in this country.

There were many issues that the Guild had with the networks, but one of the major sticking points was the practice of video on demand. Every network has a website where you can watch selected episodes of particular shows whenever you want. Cable networks also have the same thing. You can go to the On Demand page and order a specific episode, sometimes for free but often for a small fee. There are also websites that gather all of these episodes from different networks together in one place.

The networks make money off of this in the exact same way that they make money off of the shows on broadcast television. They sell advertising time to car companies, dish soap, detergent, etc. etc. So there are two differences between watching network shows on the internet and watching network shows on your television. One difference is the size of your screen, and the other is that the people who wrote these shows were not being compensated for their labors when they were being watched on the internet.

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