In August of 2006, Evan Marshall, who lived with his mother in a gated community in Glen Cove, New York, dismembered and decapitated his neighbor, Denice Fox, a retired schoolteacher who lived across the street. Marshall took her remains to his mother’s home and dismembered them, stashing the body parts, along with two knives, in basement trash cans. He was arrested the next day as he pulled into his mother’s driveway. Mrs. Fox’s head was later found in the trunk of that vehicle. Marshall pleaded guilty to murder, assault and other charges, saying he was in search of money for drugs when he confronted the woman and repeatedly stabbed her. (more…)
Earlier this year the New York City Department of Buildings had a No-Penalty Retaining Wall Inspection Program, in which homeowners could call 311 to request an inspection of their retaining wall without the penalty of violations. Retaining walls are important because they are designed to hold back soil that would move to a more natural slope or incline if the wall was not in place. Were that to occur, damage could be sustained not only to the building’s foundation, but to the foundation of an adjacent property. Additionally, there is a potential for injury or even death where construction work is being done below street level of the adjacent property and a retaining wall collapses. Similarly, when major excavation causes damage to adjacent structures, Administrative Code of the City of New York § 27-1031(b)(1) (now Administrative Code § 28-3309.4) imposes liability on an owner and contractor for such damage. (more…)
In the early days of our blog, one of our earliest posts concerned a man who (unsuccessfully) sued his dry cleaners for $54 million for supposed consumer abuse for losing his suit pants and attempting to replace them with a different, cheaper pair that did not belong to him. Now a woman is suing Google because, after using her Blackberry to Google walking directions for a trip in Park City, Utah, she claims she was led onto a busy highway, where she was struck by a vehicle. She is suing the driver of the vehicle and Google for damages “in excess of $100,000.” (more…)
When I started trying cases about 25 years ago New York County (Manhattan) was considered to be a plaintiff-friendly venue due to juries’ proclivity to render favorable verdicts. Today the plaintiffs’ bar views Manhattan juries quite differently. Litigators often attribute this to the elimination of jury service exemptions, which meant that many of the more conservative leaning professionals who reside in Manhattan who routinely avoided jury service could no longer do so. But other lawyers saw a different reason – that jury pools were skewed so that minorities were underrepresented in comparison to their proportion of the population. A study was done in 2006, and last week Governor David A. Paterson signed into law the Jury Pool Fair Representation Act. (more…)
New York’s Appellate Division adopted new rules prohibiting certain types of attorney advertising and solicitation, which were to take effect February 1, 2007. The new rules barred testimonials from clients relating to pending matters, portrayals of judges or fictitious law firms, attention-getting techniques unrelated to attorney competence, and trade names or nicknames that imply an ability to get results. The amendments also established a thirty-day moratorium for targeted solicitation following a specific incident, including targeted ads on television or in other media. A New York attorney, along with his law firm and a not-for-profit public interest organization, challenged these provisions as violating the First Amendment. (more…)
At first it was coffee. Now it’s chicken sandwiches and cancer. Perhaps the greatest propaganda tool for the insurance industry in its self-serving campaign against supposedly frivolous lawsuits is the so-called “McDonald’s Case” where the plaintiff sued for spilling hot coffee on herself. Never mind the hundreds and hundreds of prior complaints against the coffee McDonald’s deliberately super-heated in order to keep customers from realizing just how bad it tasted, or the third-degree burns to sensitive, private areas requiring grafting. (more…)
There I was in the train station, reading the newspaper while waiting for my train, when I heard a man in a loud voice say “Representative”. I turned to see a man using a pay phone and empathized with his plight to get a live person on the other end of the line. But then the man stated and spelled his name for the “representative”, said he was going to give his social security number and then did so in its entirety, and finally blurted out his date of birth. Can anybody say “identity theft”? Yet none of it seemed to phase the man, who was just trying to obtain information about how certain stocks were doing in the market that day. (more…)
It is a long-standing rule in New York that a child does not have a legally cognizable claim for damages against his parent for negligent supervision. A major impact of this rule upon personal injury practice is that it precludes a defendant in a case brought on behalf of a minor from bringing a claim (by either a counterclaim or a third-party impleader) against the minor’s parent for contribution on the basis of negligent supervision. It would not be difficult in almost any situation for a defendant to concoct a theory as to how a parent, whether present at the accident scene or not, could have done something that somehow might have prevented the accident from occurring. One can easily imagine the tension between parent and child in such a circumstance. In fact, the parent could easily be deterred from pursuing the case on behalf of his or her child at all. (more…)
One of my favorite court decisions of 2009 was the Appellate Division, Second Department decision in Vinluan v. Doyle, 60 A.D.3d 237, 873 N.Y.S.2d 72. This is so because of the eloquent and impassioned defense of the constitutional right of an attorney to give, and a client to receive, advice of counsel. The case involved the simultaneous resignation of ten nurses from positions at a Smithtown, Long Island nursing home, Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center, over pay and other working conditions, including being required to work as clerks for about $12 per hour and being housed in a single-family staff house with only one bathroom, inadequate heat, and no telephone service. The nurses were indicted for the misdemeanor offenses of conspiracy in the sixth degree, endangering the welfare of a child, and endangering the welfare of a physically-disabled person. (Among the patients at Avalon Gardens are chronically ill children who need the assistance of ventilators to breathe.) Felix Vinluan, the attorney who provided these nurses with legal advice, was also indicted for allegedly advising them to commit a crime. (more…)
A New York City public school teacher has a student in her special education class that she believes poses a danger to the safety of her classroom. The student had been verbally and physically aggressive for several months. The student’s increasing behavioral problems included bringing a knife to school, which resulted in a week’s suspension. The student frequently punched, kicked and threw various items at his classmates. He also threatened to kill the teacher, another teacher, and his fellow classmates on numerous occasions.
Concerned about the student’s behavior and the classroom safety risks it presented, (more…)
