Posted on August 17, 2008 in Medical Malpractice

A Tennessee man has obtained a $1.5 million verdict in a medical malpractice / medical negligence lawsuit against a doctor. The man lost his leg due to an infection after a bypass surgery in the leg. According to the man, "I’m just hoping that I can get the word out (so) that it doesn’t happen to anyone else."

Apparently, the doctor performed bypass surgery on the man’s left leg. The man subsequently went back to the doctor multiple times and reported that he was experiencing fevers and chills. The doctor said the man had the flu. It turned out that the man had a bacterial infection had spread into his left leg, which caused doctors to have to amputate the leg due to the infection.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases involving infection to arms and legs, some causing death and some causing amputation of limbs. These cases are tragic because the patient usually has a condition that can and is being treated with the expectation that the patient will resume a normal life. In cases involving Infections in arms and legs, it is always critical for the doctor or hospital to pay close attention to any signs or symptoms of infection (redness, swelling, warmth, unusual pain, etc.), and place the patient on antibiotics if there is any sign of infection, before the infection progresses from the limb to the body (sepsis). Doctors must err on the side of caution in treating these patients. Otherwise, loss of limb and even loss of life can occur.

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 Posted on August 14, 2008 in Driving Under the Influence

Any Experienced, Aggressive Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney will tell you that courts in Maryland and throughout the nation are getting tougher and tougher on people convicted or even charged with multiple offenses for Driving Under the Influence or Driving While Impaired by Alcohol. People in this situation are increasingly being hit with significant bails and ultimately increasing long prison terms. No longer are the days that a person charged with his or her second or third offense can count on being released on their personal recognizance and receiving probation.

A particularly shocking example of this trend is the DUI/DWI case that I was hired for on Tuesday. The client was picked up for DUI/DWI on Sunday night. He allegedly made a right turn on red at an intersection where doing so was prohibited. He pulled over immediately and was totally cooperative and polite throughout the investigation. After not performing the field sobriety tests to the satisfaction of the officer he was arrested and taken to Central Booking. Sometime on Monday morning he saw a court commission who set his bail at $10,000.

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 Posted on August 13, 2008 in Criminal Defense

Maryland Criminal Attorney Last month I blogged about a Possession with Intent to Distribute Marijuana Case that I was handling in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City that involved a Confidential Informant. I wrote that in many cases involving the Possession with Intent to Distribute Marijuana, Cocaine, Heroin or other controlled dangerous substances, the police have utilized a confidential informant known in the street vernacular as a snitch. In the case I was handling I believed that I could force the disclosure of the informant’s identity because I believed that the person may have been the brother of the person whom my client was with when he was arrested. I filed a written motion based on the facts as laid out in the statement of charges. Unfortunately, a Criminal Defense Attorney never really knows what the facts will be in their entirety until the police officers get on the stand and testify because they invariably add facts that were not in the charging document. This makes it somewhat difficult to prepare for these cases because, again the attorney doesn’t know the complete factual scenario until the court date when the motion has to be argued. As a reminder, the facts as laid out in the statement of charges is a follows:

Detectives allege that they were contacted by a registered confidential informant "during the month of February 8, March 8" and advised that "large sums of illegal narcotics were being transported and sold along the Northern Parkway corridor." The registered informant allegedly further advised that a "2dr. Acura Legend bearing a Virginia #*#@$% was transporting illegal narcotics in this vehicle." On March 4, 2008 Detectives allege that they spotted this vehicle traveling in the 5500 block of Laurelton Avenue. Acting solely on the tip of the Confidential Informant the detectives initiated a traffic stop. The driver of the vehicle was identified as Lamont and the passenger was identified as the defendant, Troy. The detectives claim that upon approaching the vehicle they smelled an odor of "freshly burnt marijuana" coming from the vehicle. The detectives also claim to have seen a zip lock bag containing marijuana in plain view on the center console. Based on these observations the detectives ordered the occupants from the vehicle and allegedly advised them of their Miranda rights. The driver was asked if he had anything illegal on his person and the detectives allege that he stated "yes some weed". He was then searched and recovered from his pocket was approximately 15 grams of marijuana. Troy was then allegedly asked the same question to which he allegedly responded ""I don’t have anything on me, you can check". Troy denies making this statement. The detectives then searched Troy and allegedly recovered $1415.00 dollars in U.S. currency. The detectives then called in a K-9 Unit and allege that the K-9 alerted on the truck area of the automobile. Recovered from the trunk was approximately 3 pounds of marijuana. The detectives then allege that Troy made the unsolicited statement, "the 3 pounds of marijuana, belonged to me". " I get the marijuana from one person and sell it to another person for about $200 profit". Troy denies making this statement. Troy was arrested. Lamont was not arrested.

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 Posted on August 12, 2008 in Criminal Defense

As a Maryland Criminal Lawyer/Attorney I frequently handle cases involving Domestic Violence Assaults. I was hired yesterday to represent an individual who is charged with a domestic violence second degree assault. He was arrested on Monday and then taken to the Court Commission who set the bail at $25,000. Unfortunately, his family did not get him bailed out prior to his bail review the next morning. Many people are not aware but a Judge can not only decrease a person’s bail at the bail review, the judge can also INCREASE THE BAIL.

This is exactly what happened in this particular case. The judge not only increased his bail, she ordered him to be held without bail. This is the second time that I have seen this happen in the last few weeks on relatively minor cases. I blogged about a client who was ordered to be held without bail by a judge in a DUI/DWI case last week in Baltimore City District Court. As in that case the client’s only option is to file a petition for habeas corpus bail review in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County and try to convince a Circuit Court Judge that holding a person who is charged with a misdemeanor assault without bail is unreasonable and amounted to an abuse of the District Court Judge’s discretion, which I certainly think is the case here.

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 Posted on August 11, 2008 in Personal Injury

The driver of a tractor trailer was tragically killed on Sunday morning when his 18-wheeler plunged into the Chesapeake Bay. According to an article in the Baltimore Sun, the accident occurred on the east bridge when a Camaro and the truck collided. The tractor trailer spun out of control, hit the jersey wall and plunged into the Chesapeake Bay. The driver of the tractor trailer was killed and two passengers in the Camaro were flown to University of Maryland, Shock Trauma.

The accident occurred during a time of two-way traffic. In this case, the west bridge was closed for repair so traffic traveling in opposite directions were using the west bridge. Authorities are still investigating the accident and the cause is still undetermined.

Lawyers in our law firm who regularly handle trucking accidents advise me that the investigation may take weeks. The driving and cargo logs of the truck must be reviewed. In addition, the investigation will also look into whether the tractor trailer was in compliance with numerous Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations.

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 Posted on August 11, 2008 in Medical Malpractice

A new study has found that most personal injury plaintiffs who decided to pass up a settlement offer and went to trial ended up getting less money then if they settled their injury case prior to trial. A copy of an article regarding the study can be found here.

While the results of that study may hold true for many lawyers, my experience as a medical malpractice lawyer in Maryland and the District of Columbia has been the opposite. For almost 20 years, I have been a civil trial lawyer handling complex litigation. Most of the matters I work on are catastrophic injury (medical malpractice, wrongful death, product liability, major collisions) and business litigation matters. I handle approximately a dozen such litigation matters a year. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, I have been successful for my clients. During my entire career, a few clients’ cases have been thrown out of court and have lost a few trials (I can recall approximately three defense verdicts), but I have been successful in more than 90% of the cases that I have pursued. This includes many trials where the defense offered either nothing prior to trial or a minimal settlement offer, resulting in my taking the case to trial and getting a million dollar plus verdict. A list of some of my verdicts can be found here.

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 Posted on August 11, 2008 in Medical Malpractice

A California jury has awarded $8.5 million to the widow of a man who died on the day a surgeon was going to discharge him from the hospital. Because of limits on medical malpractice cases, the woman probably will receive only $1.6 million of that amount.

The 49-year-old man broke six ribs in a motorcycle accident in 2002. At the trial, his wife’s attorneys argued that a doctor should have more closely monitored him after x-rays showed he had one gallon of liquid backed up in his stomach four hours before he died, and he had previously been resuscitated. The man died after choking on his own vomit.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice / medical negligence / medical error cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland involving premature hospital discharge / improper discharge from a hospital. These cases have ranged from failure to properly diagnose and treat infections / sepsis, failure to diagnose and treat pulmonary embolisms, failure to properly diagnose and treat surgical complications, failure to diagnose and treat heart attacks, failure to diagnose and properly treat brain injuries, etc. Sometimes these cases arise soon before discharge or right after. These cases are always tragic because the patient and family trust the doctor and hospital to do the right thing and, as a result, they are usually given a false sense of security in the planning of the discharge or the actual discharge itself. Many times, the patient and/or family’s concerns are dismissed and they are reassured that everything will be fine and the patient will get better. A death within days of a planned or actual discharge should always be carefully investigated.

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 Posted on August 11, 2008 in Medical Malpractice

A New York trial judge has ordered a new trial on damages in the malpractice case of a businessman left permanently paralyzed after a stroke. The plaintiff was awarded $5 million in April after a jury trial. The judge, however, set aside the verdict last week with respect to damages, finding that the award was too low. The judge then entered judgment for approximately $18.4 million. Specifically, the judge found that the jury’s award of $1 million each for past and future pain and suffering to the plaintiff and his family deviated materially from what would be fair compensation, and thus increased the award to $5 million each. The plaintiff contended in the case that doctors at a hospital failed to diagnose what they called "classic symptoms" of a brain aneurysm that led to the stroke.

In Maryland, whether in medical malpractice cases or otherwise, it is possible for judges to increase or decrease a jury verdict, but it is very rare that judges increase such verdicts. It is practically unheard of for judges to increase a verdict so much.

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 Posted on August 01, 2008 in Medical Malpractice

A Missouri jury awarded $2.58 million this week to a couple in a medical malpractice case where a retiree got a staph infection and lost his right leg, part of his left foot, a kidney and some hearing. The jury than awarded $513,000 to the wife of the man, who quit her job to help care for her husband for the last four years. The jury found the doctor and the hospital liable for causing the man to suffer 15 surgeries, 84 days in hospitals, 137 visits to doctor’s offices, brain damage and having to learn to walk again with a prosthesis.

The man had a pacemaker installed and then was discharged several days later. The next month, he became sick and was diagnosed at another hospital with the infection. The infection led doctors there to remove the pacemaker, at which time they found golf-ball size masses of infection in his body. The plaintiff alleged that the defendant doctor installed the pacemaker even though there was redness on the right wrist of the patient from an IV, and the installation became the conduit for the infection to spread.

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 Posted on July 30, 2008 in Personal Injury

It’s a familiar, but fallacious argument. A favorite of defense counsel and insurance companies in automobile accident cases: "There was a minor impact, therefore there can only be minor injury, if any injury at all." Defense lawyers often try to introduce into evidence distorted, grainy or out of focus photographs of minimal property damage without providing any expert testimony about the causal relationship between the amount of property damage and the victim’s injuries. The purpose of this tactic is to disprove by false implication what has been proven by medical evidence; to rebut the testimony of a licensed physician that has reached an opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the victim’s injuries were caused by the accident in question. There is no mention of the sudden and very high energy forces that are transmitted through the vehicle in the milliseconds after the impact. No mention of the fact that most modern cars are built to withstand a 10-15 mile per hour rear impact without suffering significant property damage, particularly if you’re dealing with an SUV or truck.

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