Posted on July 10, 2009 in Medical Malpractice

A jury has issued a $31 million verdict against an Ohio hospital in a birth injury case, which could be the largest jury award for a medical malpractice case in that state’s history. The verdict included nearly $26 million for future medical care for the boy, who is now 8.

The boy has severe cerebral palsy. He cannot speak, uses a feeding tube, can’t walk and has difficulty holding anything in his hands. He will never be able to work, and his parents are now his health care givers 24 hours a day. As usual, this has caused the family to reduce their income to take care of the child.

The Plaintiffs alleged that the boy suffered permanent, irreversible brain damage during his birth. The boy’s mother was a VBAC patient, meaning she would deliver the boy vaginally, though she had previously had a Caesarian section. That meant she was at a higher risk for a ruptured uterus during labor, which occurred. At that point, the mother’s body stopped providing necessary oxygen through the placenta, though the boy had yet to be born. The family estimated that he went 18 to 20 minutes without oxygen.

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 Posted on July 10, 2009 in Medical Malpractice

A Texas jury has awarded a man $10 million in a medical malpractice case. The man had an allergic reaction to the blood thinner Heparin. During surgery, he suffered what’s called Heparin Induced Thrombocytopenia or H.I.T., which is a complication where the blood clots instead of thinning, stopping the blood flow to the extremities. As a result, the man lost his leg from thigh down, part of his right foot and a several fingers.

I have successfully handled a number of medical malpractice cases in Baltimore and other counties in Maryland involving use of blood thinners. In fact, I successfully handled a similar case to this, where a woman developed a clotting disorder after delivering a child, resulting in the woman losing her uterus.

Interestingly, the man may be the last to receive this kind of award in Texas. He filed his case before a new law took place which caps pain and suffering awards at $250,000. These type of cap are draconian, as they prevent seriously injured people from recovering the true value of their case, and also severely limit the number of attorneys who can afford to lay out $100,000 in expenses only to recover a fee of about that amount.

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 Posted on July 03, 2009 in Criminal Defense

https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.html As a Maryland Criminal Attorney I am often hired by people who have made the very big mistake of trying to represent themselves in a criminal case. I have blogged about this topic in the past but I had a case today that vividly illustrates the peril one places oneself in by appearing in criminal court without an experienced, aggressive criminal defense attorney.

My client is a 53 year old mother and grandmother with absolutely no criminal record. She is the mother of another one of my clients so I had met her several times in the past. She was charged with witness intimidation by her estranged daughter in law and the ex-girlfriend of her son. In fact, the alleged witness intimidation occurred during the trial in which I successfully defended her son against assault charges filed by the ex-girlfriend. Essentially, she was accused of making a phone call in which she threatened the victim telling her that she better not come to court. She was also accused of standing in her way as she tried to enter the court house on the day of trial and nudging her as she walked by.

She came to my office when she was charged several months back and advised me that she was going to hire me. I told her that it was essential that she have an experienced criminal defense attorney as witness intimidation cases are being prioritized by the prosecutors these days as a result of the "stop snitching" climate that permeates most urban communities as of late. The next thing I heard about the case was yesterday when I received a panicked phone call from her son advising me that his mother had decided to represent herself, had been found guilty and sent to prison.

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 Posted on July 01, 2009 in Criminal Defense

Baltimore Maryland Criminal Attorney – Lawyers for the ACLU filed a report with the United Nations Committee to End Racial Discrimination yesterday stating that despite efforts by senior law enforcement and government officials to stop it, racial profiling still persists in this country.

The report claims that Asian Immigrants and immigrants from North Africa have been the targets of much of the racial profiling the latter group because they may be suspected of being Islamic terrorist. Latin Americans have also been targeted for possible immigration violations and African Americans were targeted because of suspected narcotics trafficking, according to the report. The Obama administration stated that it is opposed to racial profiling with exceptions for national security and border investigations.

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 Posted on June 25, 2009 in Federal Crimes & White Collar Crimes

The tremendous and unfair disparity between crack and powder cocaine in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines is no more! For many years, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for offenses involving the possession or sale of crack cocaine were exponentially more severe than the guidelines for offenses involving only powder cocaine. For example, a defendant with no prior criminal record who possessed a kilo of crack cocaine would face a guidelines sentence of between 15 – 20 years without parole. That same defendant would face a sentencing range of between 5 – 6 years if he possessed a kilo of cocaine powder.

For years, criminal defense attorneys, interest groups, and even many federal judges objected to the disparity, noting that there was no rational basis to treat crack cocaine differently from powder cocaine. Statistics revealed that the disparity adversely affected African Americans, who were most often charged with offenses involving the crack cocaine guidelines.

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 Posted on June 23, 2009 in Personal Injury

The National Transportation Safety Board has announced that it is taking over the investigation of Monday’s fatal crash of two trains on the Washington Metro’s Red Line. The NTSB involvement can only be a good thing. First, the NTSB has significant resources and has a history of not being afraid to mix it up with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration.

I first became involved in representing train accident victims in 1996 when I represented a Baltimore, Maryland family who lost their son in the fatal Amtrak/ MARC Maryland Rail Commuter train crash on February 16, 1996 in Chase, Maryland. In that accident just outside of Washington, 12 people were killed and the NTSB conducted a very comprehensive investigation. In the 1996 accident investigation, the NTSB determined driver error and signal malfunction as the cause.

History has shown that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Administration does not always like to point a finger at itself. Over the past three decades, the NTSB has criticized the agency for papering over its safety deficiencies and failing to take corrective action from past mistakes. Just yesterday, Deborah A.P. Hersman, chairman designate of the NTSB, criticized the agency for failing to follow its three year old recommendation that the aging fleet be phased out or retrofitted. This week’s tragic accident marks the sixth fatal incident involving the DC Metro.

For more information about the legal nuances of commuter train accidents, please contact Steve Silverman.

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 Posted on June 19, 2009 in Appeals - State & Federal

https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.html https://www.silvermanthompson.com/lawyer-attorney-1300820.html As A Maryland Criminal Attorney I am often retained after a defendant has gone to court and received what they perceive to be an unjust result. Some of these clients were represented by other attorneys when the bad result was obtained and some were foolish enough to have attempted to represent themselves in criminal court which is always a bad idea. In criminal court, the State is represented by a trained prosecutor who has spent years studying and practicing the law and is intimately familiar with the Maryland Rules as wells as the Criminal Procedure Article. Why someone would go to court facing the possibility of large fines, probation or even the loss of one’s freedom without retaining an attorney who is as at least as knowledgable and experienced as the State’s Attorney, is incomprehensible to me. Yet, I see it almost every day, usually with very bad results for the defendant. I represented a defendant today who had recently made this mistake and as a result spent 10 days in jail in a case that never would have resulted in jail time had she been represented by an Aggressive Maryland Criminal Attorney. Here are the facts:

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 Posted on June 10, 2009 in Criminal Defense

Maryland Criminal Attorneys who represent defendants who are charged with possession of a controlled dangerous substance need to have a solid understanding of what types of conduct by the police will lead to the application of the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule states that in circumstances in which the police violate a person’s Constitutional Rights, any evidence collected by the police will be excluded from use at trial.

The most common situation in which the exclusionary rule is applied is in the context of a car stop. In order for the police to lawfully stop a motorist, the police officer must either witness a violation of the rules of the road such as speeding or running a stop sign, or the officer must have reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS) that the operator of the vehicle is committing a crime. If it is determined by the court that the officer neither witnessed a violation of the traffic laws or had RAS to believe a crime was being committed, all evidence that is gathered as a result of the illegal stop will be suppressed. That is exactly what happened in my case today in Essex District Court, in Baltimore County. Here are the facts:

My client was driving an automobile that is owned by a friend at approximately 1:30am in the Turner’s Station section of Baltimore County. The officer wrote in his report and later testified that he recognized the car and knew from a previous MVA check that the owner of the vehicle had a suspended license. The officer acknowledged on cross examination that he did not run the registered owner of the vehicle through MVA on this occasion and did not specify when the "previous" occasion was that he did. The Assistant State’s Attorney did not revisit this issue on re-direct as she should have.

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 Posted on June 04, 2009 in Driving Under the Influence

As a Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney I am often retained for representation by offenders who have been charged and or convicted repeatedly in the past. An offender with a prior history of multiple DUI/DWI convictions presents an entirely different problem than that which faces the average first or even second offender. As I have discussed repeatedly here in this blog, even first and second offenses present the potential for incarceration these days, but if the case handled correctly this result can usually be avoided.

Offenders with two or more prior convictions, however, face almost certain incarceration if convicted in any jurisdiction in the state. As any experienced Maryland DUI/DWI lawyer will tell you, Harford County is among the strictest (if not the strictest) jurisdictions in Maryland for these types of cases which makes the risk even greater than if the offender were charged elsewhere.

I recently represented a woman on her fourth offense. Not only was she a repeat offender but the facts were bad. Several people had called in to 911 to report that a car being operated by a women on Route 40 in Harford County was driving in an extremely erratic and aggressive fashion. The callers claimed that she was swerving from lane to lane, tailgating and speeding. The police responded to the area and located the car just as it was pulling out of a gas station. The police immediately activated their emergency equipment and stopped the vehicle.

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 Posted on May 29, 2009 in Driving Under the Influence

To be a successful Maryland DUI/DWI Attorney, it is necessary to have a thorough knowledge of what constitutes a legal or illegal stop of a motor vehicle by the police. Very often, the only plausible way to defend a DUI/DWI in Maryland is to attack the basis for the stop. The reason for this is that over the last decade or so the State Legislature has passed laws that make most DUI/DWI cases, in the words of former CIA Director George Tenant, "a slam dunk" for the prosecutor, once the prosecutor establishes that the police lawfully stopped the defendant.

This is especially true if the defendant took the breathalyzer and registered a reading of .08 or greater. This is because in Maryland, a person who is proven to have been operating a motor vehicle while having a blood alcohol content of .08 or greater is "per se" guilty of driving under the influence of alcohol. Even if the defendant didn’t take the breathalyzer, however, most police officers write thorough enough reports detailing their observations of the defendant’s performance on the field sobriety tests and conduct throughout the booking process, for the State to secure a conviction at least as to driving while impaired if not to driving while under the influence. We successfully defended a case in Howard County last month that presented this exact situation. Here are the facts:

Our client was pulled over for on Interstate 95 South for, according to the police officer, "weaving within his lane" and for crossing over the white line separating the shoulder from the far right travel lane one time. The officer properly conducted the field sobriety tests (the horizontal gaze nystagmus, the walk and turn and the one leg stand) and detailed poor performance on each test in his report. He then arrested our client and offered him the opportunity to take a breathalyzer. Our client agreed to take the test and blew a reading of .13. In this situation, for the reasons noted above, there was no defense to this case other than to challenge the stop.

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