Personal injury lawsuits involve two important issues: liability and damages. You must prove both parts of a personal injury claim in order to recover compensation for your injuries.
Liability / Fault
What caused your Connecticut car accident? Who is liable for your injuries? Answering these questions is not as simple as it may seem. While you may think the fault lies entirely with the person who rear-ended you or turned into your lane of traffic, the other driver may think differently. Determining liability is even more complex after an accident involving multiple vehicles, such as a highway pile-up.
Liability can be determined through reconstructing the accident, interviewing witnesses and using other evidence that shows how the accident happened. Both parties to a personal injury lawsuit may come up with differing theories of how the accident occurred.
Connecticut is a pure comparative negligence state. This means that you can recover compensation for an accident if you were 50 percent or less at fault; however, if the insurance company can show that you were partially at fault for the accident, you will not be able to recover full compensation for your injuries and other damages. Instead, your damages will be reduced based on the percentage of negligence attributable to you.
Damages
How much will it cost to repair or replace your car? What injuries did the accident cause? How much are your medical bills? What about rehabilitation? Have you lost income because you haven’t been able to work?
These are all questions you will need to answer in order to get a good idea of your damages. The more accurate the picture, the better. The insurance company / opposing party may provide its own evidence about how much damage you have suffered. Your doctor may say one thing; its doctor, another.
If a case goes to jury trial, each party (you and the insurance company) will have the chance to prove damages through evidence such as medical records and expert testimony.
I wrote a blog back in the spring on the reasons someone would consider a legal separation instead of a divorce. The blog is here: Why choose a legal separation rather than a divorce? – Bridgeport, CT Metro/Family and Personal Injury Law Blog | Brian D. Kaschel
But as I was writing a recent blog it hit me. There may be another reason to choose a legal separation over a divorce. Social security benefits. The operative date for the “10 year rule” is the date of divorce; not the date of legal separation. Therefore, a spouse may wish to put off a divorce and choose a legal separation at least until the 10-year mark.
Read about the “10 year rule” of social security here: Social Security benefits and divorce – the 10 year rule – Bridgeport, CT Metro/Family and Personal Injury Law Blog | Brian D.
A legal separation is similar to a divorce in terms of how the case proceeds though the court. In addition, the law which applies to a legal separation, is the same as in a divorce when determining custody of children, support orders and property distribution.
Connecticut General Statutes § 52-466(f) permits a foster parent to make application for a writ of habeas corpus regarding the custody of a child currently or recently in his/her care for a continuous period of not less than ninety days.
The purpose of a foster parent filing a writ of habeas corpus is to prevent a child from being removed from the foster parent’s care – essentially requesting an injunction pending further judicial review of the child’s custody.
A recent case limited the foster parent’s right to use a writ habeas corpus to 1) only those cases where parental rights have been terminated and 2) where there are no other court proceedings pending involving the child.
The case opinion is here:
K09CP11012765 – Traci H. et al. v. DCF – CT Superior Court
Foster parents do have some rights in court. These include C.G.S.§ 46-129(o) allowing foster parents to be heard concerning the best interest of a foster child and Practice Book § 35a-5 mandating that DCF provide notice to foster parents of any court proceeding. In other very fact specific cases foster parents may also request to be made a party to the case through a Motion to Intervene.
Foster parents also are entitled to an Administrative Hearing when DCF seeks to remove a foster child that has been in the foster parent’s care for at least one year.
A recent article by the Associated Press discussed the implications of a 2005 change to Connecticut’s medical malpractice law. That change was meant to keep frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits out of the court, but has kept legitimate cases out as well.
The 2005 change requires medical malpractice patients to obtain a medical expert’s opinion in favor of their claim before they are allowed to bring a lawsuit alleging a medical professional’s or hospital’s negligence. While the requirement doesn’t seem difficult on its face, it provides an opportunity for defendants and their attorneys to attack the experts’ credentials and, if successful, get the case dismissed.
The law states that the medical experts who submit the opinion letters must have credentials similar to the defendant’s; however, some Connecticut judges have held that the credentials must be nearly identical, leading to a number of case dismissals.
Unfortunately, a bill to ease the requirements, drafted by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, was not addressed by the 2011 Senate due to opposition from the medical field.
Should a medical professional’s credentials matter enough to dismiss a case that obviously has merit? The Connecticut Supreme Court addressed this issue in January 2011. In that case, a doctor failed to diagnose a New Milford man’s fractures after he was injured in a Connecticut car accident. According to the lawsuit, the pain caused by the fractures led to a heart condition that killed the victim. The Supreme Court upheld prior dismissals, stating that the opinion letter came from a trauma surgeon while the defendant in the case was an ER doctor.
Since 2005, medical malpractice cases have dropped nearly 20 percent, which many Connecticut malpractice attorneys attribute to the mandate. There are no statistics telling us how many meritorious medical malpractice claims have been dismissed or have simply not been filed because of this rule, but even one case is far too many.
In other states – Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma and Washington – laws requiring opinion letters have been found to be unconstitutional since the letters can be very expensive (in many cases, thousands of dollars). We expect this year’s Legislature to reconsider the mandate. Hopefully, injured people and families who have lost loved ones to medical malpractice will no longer also have to suffer at the hands of the legal system.
Source: CBS News, “Conn. Law nixing legitimate malpractice lawsuits,” Associated Press, Jan. 8, 2012.
Over the last few years, studies have underlined the dangers that drivers face on Connecticut’s roads.
In the 2011 Allstate America’s Best Drivers Report, both Hartford and Bridgeport were ranked among America’s 193 most dangerous cities for car accidents. Hartford was number 187 and Bridgeport was number 173.
And according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) 2010 Motor Vehicle Crashes Overview, Connecticut car accident fatalities rose 42 percent between 2009 and 2010 – more than any other state.
These statistics show that Connecticut continues to be a dangerous place to drive even though Connecticut has one of the strictest graduated drivers licensing laws in the country and now bans all handheld cellphone use while driving. More can be done to make the roads safer for all Connecticut drivers, and the change must start with the drivers themselves.
Distracted Driving, Drunk Driving, Bad Driving
While using a handheld cellphone when driving is illegal in Connecticut, distracted driving continues to be a serious problem. There are many forms of distraction that we can all avoid, including putting on makeup, eating while driving, reading the newspaper, interacting with other passengers, and even changing radio stations. According to the NHTSA, distracted driving killed 5,500 people in 2009 alone.
Drunk driving also continues to be a problem. Oftentimes, the drunk drivers are first-time offenders – people who believed they were sober or knew they were drunk and figured they could make it home without getting caught. We must continue to hold drunk drivers responsible for the injuries they cause and turn in our keys when we know we have had one too many.
Drunk driving and distracted driving are often in the news; these are things that we know are inherently dangerous. But what about the drivers who are simply bad drivers? Many people don’t get the driver’s education training they need to drive safely. Some driver’s education programs in Connecticut are fraudulent and put unsafe drivers on the road. Others are simply not enough; for example, while novice teen drivers have a strict graduated drivers licensing program to follow, novice adult drivers do not. It is everyone’s responsibility to teach each other how to drive and to monitor our own driving.
As Connecticut personal injury attorneys, we see the consequences of poor driving decisions every day. Someone decides to get behind the wheel when he or she is too tired to drive, another person drives home (“just a few miles”) drunk, another decides that it is necessary to program something into his or her GPS. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize the danger of these poor decisions until it is too late.
We can all help make Connecticut’s roads safer by making the right choices now.
Source: The Litchfield County Times, “Unsafe Connecticut Drivers,” Bob Green, Jan. 26, 2012.