Articles Posted in Auto Accidents

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ESPN is running a story about an NFL player who was arrested last night for public intoxication. I think if public intoxication was a regularly enforced crime, we would need to build more jails.

But I was interested in something the player reportedly said to police: “I know I am drunk, but does that mean I cannot walk home?”

According to one study, driving distracted kills 5,500 people in car and truck accidents every year in this country. Don’t let the title of this blog fool you. It is beyond dispute that texting while driving is a growing part of this problem.

The Baltimore Sun reports that 25% of teenage drivers admit to texting while driving a car, and almost half say they’ve been in cars with someone who sent text messages. But kids are not the only problem. Adults that rolled their eyes at texting just a few years ago are now textaholics who read and write text messages while driving. The phenomenon is causing serious injuries and deaths on our nation’s highway. And the perpetrators are not degenerate criminals but people just like you.

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This all makes sense. The anti-texting advocates have me. But this is where they lose me: “Texting and driving is worse than drinking and driving.”

First, the statement is ridiculously misleading. Maybe, if some studies are true, you can better avoid an accident with a .08 blood level than you can in the middle of a text message. But you are drunk the whole time you are driving, not for an instant of receiving or sending a text message. So I’d rather be on the other side of a double yellow line of someone who sent a few texts than someone who is drunk any day.

But my larger criticism is the message the “worse than drunk driving” slogan sends. It is like we can’t say Heidi Klum is pretty without saying she is more attractive than Gisele Bundchen or complementing LeBron James without pointing out what he can do that Michael Jordan couldn’t. Continue reading

The Centers for Disease Control released a study that provides a wealth of information that puts the risks and costs of car, truck, and motorcycle accidents in context, particularly regarding teenage drivers:

• Vehicle accidents cost $100 billion in medical care and productivity losses every year. Almost 4% of the economic losses involve children.
• Every 10 seconds, a victim of a car accident is treated in an emergency room for accident-related injuries. Almost 40,000 people die in accidents every year.
• Motorcycle accidents cause the most significant injuries. Motorcycle accidents comprise 6% of the total but 12% of the overall costs. Pedestrians and bicyclists are in a similar boat, causing 5% of the motor vehicle-related deaths and injuries and 10% of the economic costs.
• Teenagers are four times more likely to be involved in auto accidents. Recent rules such as driving curfews and other restrictions are helping reduce the number of car accidents involving teenagers. But a few smart rules don’t flip a number like “4 times as many.” The only answer is to change the law that gives teenagers their licenses. But there is no real inertia for that because (1) it has always been this way, (2) it is more convenient for parents than having to continue to chauffeur their kids, and (3) teenagers have jobs and their inability to get to their jobs would have economic repercussions. Oh, and yes, changing the law to not allow teenagers to drive could and would probably start an armed revolution. But that nine teenagers a day die in car accidents – most of which are the teen driver’s fault – is a bitter price to pay. I don’t know of a single reasonable person who supports raising the driving age to 20. But still. It is a bitter price we pay. (And, yes, I know I just said that twice.)
• Male teenage drivers are twice as likely to be killed in crashes as females. This is another “what do you do about this?” statistic. We allow for insurance companies to charge higher premiums for teenage boys. Why can’t we make different driving ages for boys and girls? Oh, forget it, I guess I know why we can’t.
• One in every three teenage deaths results from a motor vehicle crash.

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A few weeks ago, I reported on a verdict we got against State Farm in Baltimore County. I inadvertently stumbled on the Maryland Daily Record article on the case today.

George Washington Law Review has published an article titled, appropriately, Against Summary Judgment. The premise of the article is that summary judgment is an archaic procedural device that usurps the role of the jury.

Nonsense. Summary judgment resolves cases that juries should not have to decide because the law bars the claim… or the defense.

I find annoying this premise of the article: summary judgment is bad because most cases that now go to summary judgment would settle early rather than go to trial. Cases that should fail because they have not stated a claim under the law will still settle because the defendant will want to avoid the risks and costs of litigation.

I spent a good portion of last week preparing for a trial scheduled for today that settled on Friday. It is a little depressing how many many hours our firm spends every year preparing cases for trial that settle. But every time you really prepare for a trial, you learn and, sometimes relearn law and strategies that help you down the road.

The trial was an auto accident case pending in Prince George’s County. The evidence in the case would show a classic chain-reaction car accident: Vehicle #2 rear-ends Vehicle #1 and Vehicle #3 hits Vehicle #2 which hits Vehicle #1. Plaintiff felt two impacts that could only happen under this pattern.

Plaintiff’s treating orthopedic surgeon would testify that the injury is related to the accident. The problem—which caused me a momentary freakout—was that the doctor could not parse which accident caused the injury. How could the doctor possibly know which accident caused the injury?

Maryland Law on Chain Reactions Accidents

First, what is a chain reaction?   The definition of a train reaction as we use it is a crash in which three or more vehicles hit one another because of an initial act of negligence.

One big question is who can you sue in a chain reaction accident? We have joint and several liability in Maryland and there can be over one proximate cause of an accident. But my fear was that because the first impact was more significant than the second this would highlight to the court that Vehicle #3 may not have been a significant contributor to the Plaintiff’s injuries. So, the driver of Vehicle #3’s lawyer Erie Insurance) could argue that there is no evidence that his negligence caused the injury. Then, Vehicle #2’s lawyer (also, ironically, Erie) would argue, you know, that same logic applies to us. Even if our drivers are negligent, the joint argument goes, how is this different from a drunk in a bar throwing a punch that never lands? Negligence in the air is not negligence.

I couldn’t put my hands on it right away, but I was confident there was Maryland law that would save me from this argument. See Thodos v. Bland, 542 A.2d 1307, 75 Md.App. 700 (Md. App., 1987) and, even better, Consumer Protection Division v. Morgan, 387 Md. 125 (2005). But even with that law, I was struggling with the rationale. I wanted a source more reliable than my argument of “it would be even more unfair if the plaintiff could not recover in such a case.” Continue reading

When an insurance company gets a claim, the first thing it does is look for ways to deny the claim before getting to the merits. I don’t say this derisively. This is how the game is played.

One insanely overused method of avoiding getting to the merits of a case is claiming the defendant driver was not a permissive user. Insurance companies often take remarkably strained views of what is required to allow permission for another to use the owner’s vehicle.

This morning, in Agency Insurance v. State Farm, a wrongful death car accident claim, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals gave Maryland insurance companies a bit more ammo for this defense. The opinion was written by Judge Irma S. Raker, one of the more conservative judges on the Maryland Court of Appeals who is now retired and was specially assigned to the CSA. The case involved two passengers who were killed in an accident in Frederick County. The battle between these insurance companies was over permissive use. The court found that the vehicle owner’s daughter, a senior in high school who was killed in the accident, did not have permission to give permission to her boyfriend to use the vehicle.

But here’s the thing: the boyfriend had used the vehicle before with the owner’s permission. The only argument State Farm had was that there was no specific permission in this case. The only person who could have rebutted that testimony would have been the owner’s daughter who was killed.

I believe the court slices too thinly over whether the daughter’s boyfriend had permission to drive her mom’s car. Because there are too many variables at play. When she allowed the boy to drive the car before, was it made into an enormous deal, or was it a “sure, of course” type response? Assuming there was not a fatal accident, how mad would she have been if she had learned that the boy was driving the car? There should be a bright-line rule to avoid this Serbonian bog and it should err in favor of coverage. Continue reading