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The New York Times reports on a new World Health Organization and UNICEF report that found that childhood accidents account for approximately 830,000 deaths annually around the world. Just an incredible statistic. Injury accidents are to blame for 40% of childhood deaths in developing countries. Car crashes were the leading cause of death for children under 5. A lens to how needless these deaths are: 5,000 children die from drinking the kerosene their parents use for cooking, a problem easily remedied with childproof caps.

Obviously, the United States is not immune, either. A CDC study released in conjunction with this report determined that accidents kill over 12,000 children in the United States each year.

The problem internationally is obviously harder for us to solve. Domestically, the CDC suggests three things: (1) graduated driver’s license laws, forbidding teenagers to drive at night or with teenage passengers (which may be a bit of a mixed bag), (2) to enforce seat-belt laws on teenagers, and (3) laws requiring children younger than 8 years-old to ride in booster seats.

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The Maryland Retailers Association got a $276,268 check from IWIF Workers’ Compensation Insurance. Why is a workers’ compensation insurance company – the largest provider of workers’ compensation insurance in Maryland – paying this retailers association? The payment is a group safety dividend check for controlling losses and preventing workplace injuries and accidents in 2007.

Certainly, it is a good idea to reward safe practices in the workplace so this sounds like a good plan.

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Workers’ Compensation Section of the Maryland Association for Justice (formerly the Maryland Trial Lawyers Association) will present a “beyond the basics” on Maryland’s workers’ compensation seminar on November 11, 2008 at 1:00p.m.-4:30p.m. at Sheraton City Center on 101 W. Fayette Street in Baltimore, Maryland.

The topics of this Maryland workers’ compensation seminar are:

Creative Settlement Agreements

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Car insurance is mandatory throughout the country, including Maryland. Yet you would be amazed how many uninsured motorist claims we see every week. As many as 20% of Americans do not have car insurance. The numbers in Maryland have not been estimated in years (that I have seen, anyway) but while not approaching that figure, the number is still too high.

In Maryland, the legislature made uninsured motorist coverage mandatory in 1975.

 

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Most car accidents occur with injuries. Maryland accident lawyers typically do not get involved in such cases, leaving accident victims to deal with handling the property damage claim and getting a rental car themselves.

Convincing the insurance company to provide a rental car is a hassle in some Maryland accident case, even if you have a lawyer much less without. This article on getting a rental car from the insurance company after an accident provides a few thoughts for those of you who are traveling solo without a Maryland accident lawyer.

Remember that one good way to take this issue out of play even further is to purchase rental reimbursement coverage. It costs very little – only $12 a year under most auto insurance policies – but it is an investment worth making.

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The Baltimore Injury Lawyer Blog talks about a trial where the jury awarded all the Plaintiff’s medical bills but awarded nothing for the client’s pain and suffering.

This was not the type of case we would appeal because while our lawyers were not thrilled with the verdict, the client was extremely happy with the result being more than 8 times the offer.

maryland accident verdictsBut if our lawyers had appealed this verdict, I think we would have failed. In Patras v. Syphax, 166 Md. App. 67 (2005), the Maryland Court of Special Appeals heard an appeal in a rear-end auto accident in Montgomery County on Georgia Avenue (which is familiar to many of us). The case involved the Plaintiff’s request for a new trial because of a claimed inconsistency in the jury’s verdict.

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The Baltimore Sun has an interesting story on balancing compassion and victim’s rights in fatal car accidents in Maryland.

These are tough issues. What should be the criminal penalties for those who negligently (distinguished from drunk for our purposes here) kill others in fatal car accidents? Should criminal courts admit “I’m sorry” evidence from the driver accused of killing another in a motor vehicle?

 

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The Maryland Court of Special Appeals today affirmed summary judgment against the Plaintiffs in the case of Pulliam v. Motor Vehicle Administration, a tragic case involving the death of a man and his three children in a rear-end car accident at the intersection of Butterfly Lane and Jefferson Pike in Frederick County.

Facts of Pulliam

The battlefield in this appellate battle was whether Pulliam’s driver’s license had been properly suspended by the MVA. Pulliam claimed that the MVA had suspended his license without providing him with adequate notice or an opportunity to contest the suspension. The MVA, on the other hand, argued that Pulliam had been properly notified of the suspension and that he had been given a fair opportunity to contest it.  For context, Pulliam was not having license issue for bad behavior – he was having seizures.

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Maryland was one of 32 states that decreased their number of drunk driving fatalities, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report issued yesterday. Drunk driving deaths in Maryland declined by 10, a 5.3% decrease. The national average was a 3.7% decrease.

This is good news. The bad news is that almost 13,000 people were killed in car, truck, and motorcycle accidents where the driver was shown to have a BAC of .08 or higher. If we took the money spent on the Bay Bridge and put it into more drunk driving checkpoints, we only save about 20 times the number of lives.

More troubling news was that the number of motorcycle drivers killed in alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents increased by 7.5 percent. The government has been doing a good job pushing the motorcycle accident issue head-on, featuring motorcycle accidents in their $13 million advertising campaign to attack the drug driving accident problem that comes on Labor Day weekend.

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Hit and run and phantom vehicle cases can be a challenge for Maryland accident lawyers. But good lawyers can obtain compensation for their clients in the vast majority of cases.

In Maryland, if you are injured in an accident as the result of the negligence of a hit-and-run driver, you can still recover for your medical bills, lost income from work, and pain and suffering damages as if the driver had been identified by bringing an uninsured motorist claim or lawsuit pursuant to your own car insurance policy. Maryland law treats an unknown negligent driver as it would for a known uninsured driver for purposes of the injury victim’s uninsured motorist policy.

With respect to phantom vehicles – those vehicles that cause an accident but then drive away before then can be identified – some states require physical contact with the phantom vehicle for the injury victim to make an uninsured motorist claim. Maryland law, however, does not require physical contact. If the insurance company has policy language to the contrary, Maryland courts will ignore the language.

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