Personal Injury Law Recap For The Last Week Of May 2014
Our New York Personal Injury Lawyers and Westchester Accident Attorneys often discuss recent implications of accidents and the legal implications of them.
The last week of May, 2014 was a week filled with tragic accidents. On May 30, 2014, a school child from Yonkers fell out of a moving school bus and was injured. There is obvious fault on behalf of the school officials and bus driver who failed to monitor the situation and stop the bus when the child intentionally opened the back door.
Also a New York State Trooper was killed leaving behind a family, after he was struck in a hit and run accident. Hopefully they find the individual, but even if they don’t our experienced New York City accident attorneys who handle police line of duty cases and hit and run accidents know exactly what needs to be done in this type of situation. The family needs to immediately seek both job related benefits and uninsured/ unidentified motorist benefits. In this case, the State will likely be on the hook to compensate the family for the wrongful death of the trooper, which must be brought in the Court of Claims. Likewise, a claim with the Motor Vehicle Accident Indemnification Corp, also known as MVAIC, should be filed, out of an abundance of caution.
On May 29, 2014, a tractor trailer carrying 80,000 pounds of trash rolled over in Peekskill on Route 9 North. While only the driver was injured, had the truck driver struck another vehicle or injured someone, the trucking company would likely be liable for negligence because the most common causes of truck roll overs are driver error in taking a turn while going too fast or negligence in overloading the truck, which causes the load to shift. When a load shift happens in a commercial truck, it exerts excessive pressure to one side and can cause the trailer to shift to one side and the entire truck to roll over.
Also on May 29, 2014, a Staten Island rapid transit train derailed and hit a bumper at Arthur Kill Road and Bentley Street. Train derailments are always the result of either conductor error in operating the train at an excessive speed or in track maintenance, or occasionally a foreign object being placed on the track. It is interesting that several workers were injured in this accident and in the context of railroads, whether an employee is covered under F.E.L.A., depends on whether the train was an intra-state carrier or an interstate carrier or a connection thereto. For example, New York City subway workers cannot sue their employers for train accidents, but Metro-North, Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road workers can.
In Rikers Island, there was an obvious wrongful death when an inmate died from heat stroke, in a cell which was 101 degrees back in 2010. The guard was finally disciplined for leaving her post that terrible day. Correctional institutes in New York have a responsibility to care for the safety of those inmates in their charge and can be held liable for negligence. Likewise, this would certainly be a federal civil rights violation of either the Eight Amendments’ cruel and unusual punishment clause or the Fourth Amendment’s unlawful seizure clause or the Fourteenth Amendments’ right to life and liberty and due process clauses. Our New York attorneys have extensive experience in litigating Federal Civil Rights cases under 42 U.S.C. 1983, including for abuses in Riker’s Island.
