Syracuse Personal Injury Law Blog

3 passengers injured in Oneida County accident

Published on: February 25, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Though many people in Oneida County may assume that the only way to file a personal injury lawsuit in a car accident is when there are at least two cars involved, they are wrong. Say you are riding in a car and someone else is driving. If that driver is texting, is drunk or is otherwise negligent and causes an accident, you can file a personal injury lawsuit. It does not matter how many vehicles are involved, so long as there is a negligent driver.

It is a driver’s responsibility to avoid an accident and to not cause serious injuries. Although the assumption is that he or she needs to avoid injuring other drivers, bicyclists, motorcyclists or really anyone else on the road, it actually means that he or she needs to avoid injuring anyone, including his or her own passengers. If an accident happens and it is the fault of the driver, he or she could be found liable.

Three passengers in a vehicle being driven by a 17-year-old Waterville boy may be looking into personal injury lawsuits after the teenager crashed the vehicle in which they were riding. The passengers, ranging in age from 20 to 39 years old are all from upstate New York. It is unknown how they knew the driver or why they were in the vehicle with him this weekend.

Driving under the influence of marijuana — still a risk

Published on: February 22, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Even though marijuana is illegal in New York, there are still many people who use the drug illegally. There are some people in Syracuse who think there is no problem with marijuana use and others who believe it to be incredibly risky, yet regardless of what people think, studies have shown that marijuana in the system increases the risk of an accident. Though stoned driving may not be considered as risky as driving while intoxicated, it is still dangerous driving.

While states may have laws that punish stoned drivers, it can be hard to test for drivers who have been smoking. For one, many of them can pass the standardized road tests that many drunk people fail. Moreover, the only way to test for THC, the chemical compound in marijuana, is by administering a blood or urine test, something that is typically done hours after arrest.

Although there appears to be a lack of technology that is preventing police from nailing stoned drivers, it is important that this kind of dangerous behavior be stopped. It doesn’t matter that drunk driving increases the risk of accidents 20 times and it is only two times as high with marijuana, no one deserves to be injured on Syracuse’s streets because of a stoned driver. Fortunately, if there is an accident, a crash victim can file a lawsuit against the driver responsible.

Syracuse man suffers head injury when driver cuts him off

Published on: February 20, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

It is vitally important that anyone on the road follows all traffic regulations. These laws are in place because they keep Syracuse drivers safe. While some people may not care if they put their lives at risk, it is more than just them who are in danger. When a driver follows too closely or fails to stop at a red light, he or she is putting everyone else on the road’s lives at risk. Though it is absolutely tragic when an accident happens because one driver just wouldn’t follow the law, an injured driver can file a personal injury lawsuit against the driver responsible for the crash.

Unfortunately, if that driver cannot be found or identified, it makes filing a personal injury lawsuit much more difficult. For a 26-year-old Syracuse man who was recently involved in a car accident, knowing who the driver was that cut him and another driver off is essential if he wants to file a personal injury lawsuit.

Following the accident, he told police that he hurt his head and he was taken to Upstate University Hospital. It is not clear how serious of a head injury he has suffered. What is clear, however, is that the accident was likely caused by the unknown third driver.

A hospital may have given 18 people a fatal brain disease

Published on: February 12, 2014 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

When someone in Syracuse goes in for surgery, he or she has absolutely no control over the sterilization processes used, how the operating room was cleaned and sanitized, or whether the doctors are doing everything they can to prevent the transfer of germs and disease. With the exception of just not going to the hospital, a patient can do nothing to avoid exposure to other pathogens in the hospital.

This is why, then, it is the hospital’s responsibility to ensure that their facility is as clean as possible, that procedures are in place to prevent the transfer of germs and that all equipment is properly sterilized. Failing to do so, however, is a strong indication of hospital malpractice. If anyone were to become injured by this malpractice, the hospital may find itself in court.

In this story, it could be a North Carolina hospital that will be defending itself against several medical malpractice lawsuits after it exposed 18 people to a fatal brain disorder. Known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the condition causes aggressive dementia. There is no cure, no treatment and it always ends in death.

Bus driver on cell phone jumps sidewalk, kills infant

Published on: August 5, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

A bus driver is being charged with death by auto in a tragic incident on July 30 that killed an eight-month-old baby on in West New York, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York City. A police officer who arrived on the scene performed CPR on the infant, but ultimately was not able to save her.

Officers say the driver was talking on his cell phone when he lost control of the bus. It jumped the curb and struck a lamppost, which hit the baby carriage. In addition to the criminal offense of death by auto, which carries a prison term of five to ten years, the 48-year-old bus driver was issued summonses for reckless driving and using a cell phone while operating a motor vehicle.

According to a witness, the bus had just completed a stop to let off and pick up passengers when the chaos began. As soon as the bus started up again, the wheels began to spin and the bus seemed to go out of control. It jumped the curb and crashed into a lamppost, which struck the baby in her carriage. The bus continued moving, hitting a tree and then another lamppost. It also hit a parked car, which in turn plowed into several other parked cars. One of those cars had four people in it who suffered minor injuries.

Hudson Valley orthopedic surgeon faces multiple malpractice suits

Published on: July 26, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

A former Poughkeepsie, New York, orthopedic surgeon who is facing multiple medical malpractice lawsuits performed a stunning number of surgeries — an average of 17 a day. This is based on surgical logs obtained by multiple sources.

The surgeon, who was fired from a local medical group in 2011, has had 261 lawsuits since 2009 for botched, ineffective, or unnecessary operations, and more. In some cases, according to plaintiffs, the records show surgeries that did not take place. They say surgical logs indicate that sometimes he put people under anesthesia, but did not do surgery. Two attorneys say they have logs indicating that he performed multiple procedures in less than eight minutes. Plaintiffs also allege that he billed them for procedures he did not perform. Records obtained by the Poughkeepsie Journal corroborate the numbers found by the attorneys — as many as 22 in one day. By comparison, the average orthopedic surgeon performs 32 procedures in a month, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons.

The surgeon, however, is not the only one being held liable. Many of the suits also name the medical facility where the surgery was performed for lack of oversight in failing to question or limit the number of procedures the doctor performed, and in some cases for ignoring concerns voiced by staff members. Several area medical facilities are named in the lawsuits. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say the surgical logs are proof that others knew what he was doing, and did nothing to stop it.

New York tortilla factory owner sentenced for labor violations

Published on: July 19, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

An investigation following the tragic death of a Brooklyn, New York, tortilla factory worker in 2011 has led to charges and conviction of the factory’s owner for labor law violations. These include failure to obtain workers’ compensation insurance for his employees. The owner pleaded guilty, and has been sentenced to 90 days in jail.

The accident occurred in January 2011 when a 22-year-old employee fell into a mixing machine, and was crushed to death by the churning mechanism. New York state officials investigating the factory after the man’s death shut it down when they discovered that the company had not carried workers’ compensation insurance for nearly a year. Although the factory eventually reopened, it was cited by federal officials for safety violations.

The safety violations actually had nothing to do with the criminal charges against the 57-year-old business owner, who was arrested in 2012 by the state attorney general’s office. In June of that year, he pleaded guilty to several counts of failing to pay adequate wages, which is a misdemeanor, and failure to obtain workers’ compensation insurance, which is a felony.

Syracuse hospital nearly harvested organs of live patient

Published on: July 11, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

The Syracuse Post-Standard has just published documents detailing a potentially catastrophic medical mistake by St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in October 2009. They were about to harvest the organs of a patient they believed to be dead when she opened her eyes.

Doctors determined that a woman who had overdosed on Xanax and over-the-counter drugs had suffered cardiac death and irreversible brain damage. Her family agreed to take her off life support and let her organs be removed for transplant. However, as she was wheeled into the operating room, she woke from what had been a deep coma from the overdose.

When the state Department of Health reviewed the case, investigators found that staff had ignored signs of the patient’s improvement. They determined that the woman had not suffered a cardiopulmonary arrest or irreversible brain damage. The state outlined steps that doctors failed to take, including performing enough brain scans, and testing to ensure the drugs were out of her system. Further, doctors ignored nurses’ observations of her increasing neurological function.

Bill to ease NY’s time limits on malpractice suits withdrawn

Published on: July 5, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

A proposed law that would have eased the statute of limitations on medical malpractice lawsuits has died in the New York State Assembly. The proposed legislation was known as Lavern’s Law, after a Brooklyn woman who died of lung cancer this year.

The saga of the bill’s namesake began in 2010 when doctors at Kings Hospital allegedly discovered a mass on a chest x-ray, but failed to tell her about it. When she started having serious breathing problems, another Kings County doctor discovered what had happened. However, by then, it was too late under New York law for her to sue for the medical mistake. She developed cancer that spread to both lungs, and died earlier this year at the age of 41. She is survived by a 15-year-old autistic daughter.

Assemblywoman Helene Weinstein of Brooklyn, who sponsored Lavern’s Law, withdrew it even though it had the backing of others in the Assembly, because she learned that it would not have the support of State Senate leader Dean Skelos. Weinstein, a long-time campaigner against New York’s medical malpractice statute of limitations, said that when she saw that the bill would not be taken up by the State Senate, she decided it would be better to withdraw it, and try again in the next session. She says she did not want to subject the bill to debate in the Assembly only to see it go nowhere in the Senate.

Four New York nurses arrested for illegal medication dispensing

Published on: June 21, 2013 | By Jeff DeFrancisco

Four nurses at Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown, New York, have been charged with illegally dispensing medication. The most recent nurse to be arrested was a full-time emergency room nurse, while the other three were traveling nurses.

The full-time nurse, who has been suspended, was found to have discrepancies in several controlled substance withdrawal, administration, and wasting medications between December of 2012 and April of 2013. The three traveling nurses were charged with illegally dispensing various medications, including hydrocodone, oxycodone, Dilaudid, Norco, and Tylenol with Codeine, without a physician’s order. According to Samaritan Medical Center, all three of those nurses were immediately terminated.

A spokesperson for the Samaritan Medical Center said they discovered all four nurses’ violations in their monthly audit of the drug dispensing system. She says they reported their findings to the Bureau of Narcotics and the New York State Police when they discovered the problem. She also reported that the medical center plans to conduct audits more frequently, and make changes to their hiring system. However, she noted that they already do a background check on all nurses, whether traveling or full-time. This includes a drug screening. The nurses were working at this facility on a temporary basis to fill vacancies that resulted from the expansion of Samaritan Medical Center’s emergency room over the past few months.