Posted on July 13, 2009 in Premises Liability

A Florida jury has awarded $750,000 each to the parents of a young man who was strangled to death in a restaurant’s parking lot, in a negligent security case. Jurors decided that the management company that owns a McDonalds and the company that owns the property were negligent for not providing security on the morning of the man’s death. According to the plaintiffs, there were over 750 calls for service from the McDonald’s and the surrounding parking lot between 2001 and 2005. The calls were for juvenile disturbances, loitering and assaults. About 200 of the calls mentioned alcohol use and most were made between midnight and 5 a.m. on Friday nights into Saturday mornings and Saturday nights into Sunday mornings. The defense had argued that the types of calls did not indicate that a homicide was about to take place. A copy of the article regarding the case can be found here.

I have successfully handled many cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland against negligent property owners. Some are major slip and fall or trip and fall cases. Some have been negligent security cases. In such a case in Maryland, the law states that a landlord has a duty to exercise reasonable care for the safety of tenants and invitees. If a landlord knows or by the exercise of reasonable care should know that criminal activity against persons or property has occurred on the landlord’s property, the landlord has a duty to take reasonable measures to pro-tect tenants and invitees against these criminal activities. In determining whether the measures taken by the landlord were sufficient, the landlord’s acts can be measured only by the criminal activities occurring on the landlord’s property and of which the landlord knew or should have known and not by those criminal activities occurring generally in the surround¬ing neighborhood.

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 Posted on July 13, 2009 in Truck Accident

A Florida judge has required an insurance company to pay a paralyzed truck driver $14.6 million due to a 2007 accident. The plaintiff was driving an 18-wheeler when another driver ran a stop sign, cutting the plaintiff off. The truck driver swerved out of the way, and his truck overturned. The accident cost the plaintiff the use of both his arms and legs and left him with extensive medical bills. If the plaintiff had not swerved, the other driver would have been killed. The insurer for the truck driver denied coverage, so the truck driver sued.

I have successfully handled a number of major car and truck collision cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland. Truck collision cases in Maryland are especially complicated because the lawyer must know the intricacies of federal and state truck rules and regulations, maintenance requirements, inspections, limitations on the number of hours drivers may drive, etc.

In one recent Baltimore truck accident case that I handled, the driver of the truck that struck my client and caused significant brain damage had been involved in several other accidents before causing my client’s accident. I retained a very well respected trucking expert who said not only was the truck driver negligent for causing the accident, but the trucking company was negligent for continuing to employ the truck driver after several accidents. This resulted in a major million dollar plus settlement.

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 Posted on July 10, 2009 in Birth Trauma Malpractice / Cerebral Palsy Malpractice

A jury has issued a $31 million verdict against an Ohio hospital in a birth injury case, which could be the largest jury award for a medical malpractice case in that state’s history. The verdict included nearly $26 million for future medical care for the boy, who is now 8.

The boy has severe cerebral palsy. He cannot speak, uses a feeding tube, can’t walk and has difficulty holding anything in his hands. He will never be able to work, and his parents are now his health care givers 24 hours a day. As usual, this has caused the family to reduce their income to take care of the child.

The Plaintiffs alleged that the boy suffered permanent, irreversible brain damage during his birth. The boy’s mother was a VBAC patient, meaning she would deliver the boy vaginally, though she had previously had a Caesarian section. That meant she was at a higher risk for a ruptured uterus during labor, which occurred. At that point, the mother’s body stopped providing necessary oxygen through the placenta, though the boy had yet to be born. The family estimated that he went 18 to 20 minutes without oxygen.

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 Posted on July 10, 2009 in Medication Malpractice

A Texas jury has awarded a man $10 million in a medical malpractice case. The man had an allergic reaction to the blood thinner Heparin. During surgery, he suffered what’s called Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia or H.I.T., which is a complication where the blood clots instead of thinning, stopping the blood flow to the extremities. As a result, the man lost his leg from thigh down, part of his right foot and a several fingers.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland involving use of blood thinners. In fact, I successfully handled a similar case to this, where a woman developed a clotting disorder after delivering a child, resulting in the woman losing her uterus.

Interestingly, the man may be the last to receive this kind of award in Texas. He filed his case before a new law took place which caps pain and suffering awards at $250,000. These type of cap are draconian, as they prevent seriously injured people from recovering the true value of their case, and also severely limit the number of attorneys who can afford to lay out $100,000 in expenses only to recover a fee of about that amount.

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 Posted on July 03, 2009 in Witness Intimidation

https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.htmlAs a Maryland Criminal Attorney I am often hired by people who have made the very big mistake of trying to represent themselves in a criminal case. I have blogged about this topic in the past but I had a case today that vividly illustrates the peril one places oneself in by appearing in criminal court without an experienced, aggressive criminal defense attorney.

My client is a 53 year old mother and grandmother with absolutely no criminal record. She is the mother of another one of my clients so I had met her several times in the past. She was charged with witness intimidation by her estranged daughter in law and the ex-girlfriend of her son. In fact, the alleged witness intimidation occurred during the trial in which I successfully defended her son against assault charges filed by the ex-girlfriend. Essentially, she was accused of making a phone call in which she threatened the victim telling her that she better not come to court. She was also accused of standing in her way as she tried to enter the court house on the day of trial and nudging her as she walked by.

She came to my office when she was charged several months back and advised me that she was going to hire me. I told her that it was essential that she have an experienced criminal defense attorney as witness intimidation cases are being prioritized by the prosecutors these days as a result of the “stop snitching” climate that permeates most urban communities as of late. The next thing I heard about the case was yesterday when I received a panicked phone call from her son advising me that his mother had decided to represent herself, had been found guilty and sent to prison.

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 Posted on July 01, 2009 in Constitutional Violations

Baltimore Maryland Criminal Attorney – Lawyers for the ACLU filed a report with the United Nations Committee to End Racial Discrimination yesterday stating that despite efforts by senior law enforcement and government officials to stop it, racial profiling still persists in this country.

The report claims that Asian Immigrants and immigrants from North Africa have been the targets of much of the racial profiling the latter group because they may be suspected of being Islamic terrorist. Latin Americans have also been targeted for possible immigration violations and African Americans were targeted because of suspected narcotics trafficking, according to the report. The Obama administration stated that it is opposed to racial profiling with exceptions for national security and border investigations.

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 Posted on June 25, 2009 in Federal Criminal Defense

The tremendous and unfair disparity between crack and powder cocaine in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is no more! For many years, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for offenses involving the possession or sale of crack cocaine were exponentially more severe than the guidelines for offenses involving only powder cocaine. For example, a defendant with no prior criminal record who possessed a kilo of crack cocaine would face a guidelines sentence of between 15 – 20 years without parole. That same defendant would face a sentencing range of between 5 – 6 years if he possessed a kilo of cocaine powder.

For years, criminal defense attorneys, interest groups, and even many federal judges objected to the disparity, noting that there was no rational basis to treat crack cocaine differently from powder cocaine. Statistics revealed that the disparity adversely affected African Americans, who were most often charged with offenses involving the crack cocaine guidelines.

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 Posted on June 23, 2009 in Train Accidents

The National Transportation Safety Board has announced that it is taking over the investigation of Monday’s fatal crash of two trains on the Washington Metro’s Red Line. The NTSB involvement can only be a good thing. First, the NTSB has significant resources and has a history of not being afraid to mix it up with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration.

I first became involved in representing train accident victims in 1996 when I represented a Baltimore, Maryland family who lost their son in the fatal Amtrak/ MARC Maryland Rail Commuter train crash on February 16, 1996 in Chase, Maryland. In that accident just outside of Washington, 12 people were killed and the NTSB conducted a very comprehensive investigation. In the 1996 accident investigation, the NTSB determined driver error and signal malfunction as the cause.

History has shown that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration does not always like to point a finger at itself. Over the past three decades, the NTSB has criticized the agency for papering over its safety deficiencies and failing to take corrective action from past mistakes. Just yesterday, Deborah A.P. Hersman, chairman designate of the NTSB, criticized the agency for failing to follow its three year old recommendation that the aging fleet be phased out or retrofitted. This week’s tragic accident marks the sixth fatal incident involving the DC Metro.

For more information about the legal nuances of commuter train accidents, please contact Steve Silverman.

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 Posted on June 19, 2009 in Uncategorized

https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.htmlhttps://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.htmlAs A Maryland Criminal Attorney I am often retained after a defendant has gone to court and received what they perceive to be an unjust result. Some of these clients were represented by other attorneys when the bad result was obtained and some were foolish enough to have attempted to represent themselves in criminal court which is always a bad idea. In criminal court, the State is represented by a trained prosecutor who has spent years studying and practicing the law and is intimately familiar with the Maryland Rules as wells as the Criminal Procedure Article. Why someone would go to court facing the possibility of large fines, probation or even the loss of one’s freedom without retaining an attorney who is as at least as knowledgable and experienced as the State’s Attorney, is incomprehensible to me. Yet, I see it almost every day, usually with very bad results for the defendant. I represented a defendant today who had recently made this mistake and as a result spent 10 days in jail in a case that never would have resulted in jail time had she been represented by an Aggressive Maryland Criminal Attorney. Here are the facts:

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 Posted on June 10, 2009 in Search and Seizure

Maryland Criminal Attorneys who represent defendants who are charged with possession of a controlled dangerous substance need to have a solid understanding of what types of conduct by the police will lead to the application of the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule states that in circumstances in which the police violate a person’s Constitutional Rights, any evidence collected by the police will be excluded from use at trial.

The most common situation in which the exclusionary rule is applied is in the context of a car stop. In order for the police to lawfully stop a motorist, the police officer must either witness a violation of the rules of the road such as speeding or running a stop sign, or the officer must have reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) that the operator of the vehicle is committing a crime. If it is determined by the court that the officer neither witnessed a violation of the traffic laws or had RAS to believe a crime was being committed, all evidence that is gathered as a result of the illegal stop will be suppressed. That is exactly what happened in my case today in Essex District Court, in Baltimore County. Here are the facts:

My client was driving an automobile that is owned by a friend at approximately 1:30am in the Turner’s Station section of Baltimore County. The officer wrote in his report and later testified that he recognized the car and knew from a previous MVA check that the owner of the vehicle had a suspended license. The officer acknowledged on cross examination that he did not run the registered owner of the vehicle through MVA on this occasion and did not specify when the “previous” occasion was that he did. The Assistant State’s Attorney did not revisit this issue on re-direct as she should have.

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