Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution’s Editorial Board came out on Monday in favor of legislation currently pending in the Georgia General Assembly that would toughen penalties for teenagers who are caught not wearing their seatbelts while they are driving or riding in a car. The legislation, HB 924, is currently “dead” because it was not passed by one house prior to “cross-over” day, the deadline for legislation to pass at least one house to be considered by the other house. The sponsor of the legislation, Representative Melvin Everson (R-Snellville), will be looking at other bills still alive to which he could attach his seatbelt legislation.

This legislation is a good idea. As both a personal injury trial lawyer in Atlanta and a mother of a teenager, any law that would stiffen penalities for teenagers who don’t wear their seatbelts will save lives. Too often I have sat here in my office with parents who have either lost a child or had one seriously injured because they weren’t wearing their seatbelts at the time of a car wreck. Parents often tell me they insist on their children wearing seatbelts while riding with them, but it is a different story when those same teenagers are in a car with their friends. Their parents’ rules of wearing seatbelts are quick to fly out the window.

And it has been proven in recent medical studies that teenagers simply don’t have the brain development necessary to be able to make good judgment calls, such as always wearing seat belts. These new studies show teenagers are more likely to demonstrate impulsive behavior rather than sound judgments because the frontal lobes of their brains, that area where high thinking or executive functioning takes place, is not fully functional during teenage years. Teens simply don’t have the appropriate level of brain functioning to make good judgmental decisions such as always wearing their seatbelts.

This child never had a chance. Yesterday, in Atlanta, a two month old infant was killed because she was sitting in her mother’s lap while her mother was driving a car and hit a telephone pole. The air bag deployed, as it should, and the infant died immediately. The mother was physcially unharmed. As would have been her baby if the mother had simply taken one minute to strap her into a child’s car seat.

Parents can learn more about child car seat safety from the National Highway Traffic Safety Admininstration (NHTSA) and its Child Passenger Safety Program. Specifically, for Georgia law on child car seats, parents can have their questions answered at The Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

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An Arizona jury returned a plaintiff’s verdict yesterday of a whopping $36.5 Million against Swift Trucking Company for Swift Trucking’s driver’s negligence in causing a horrible crash that killed the father of eight children. $13.5 Million of the verdict was for punitive damages to punish Swift for not producing their driver’s logs in the litigation. Tractor-Trailer drivers are required by Federal law to maintain log books showing how many hours they have driven. At issue in this case, and many others, was driver fatigue.

Swift tractor-trailers are all over the roads of Metro Atlanta and Georgia. For safety’s sake, drive as far away as possible from big tractor-trailers. Leave a lane between you and them if you can. Try never to drive in front of them if possible. Some wrecks, like the one in Arizona, are 100% the fault of the truck driver and there is often nothing the victim could have done to avoid the wreck. But it helps increase your chances of not having a wreck with them if you stay as far away from them on the roads as possible.

Another log truck accident in Milledgeville, Georgia has killed a 12 year old girl and injured her mother. The accident happened on Sparta Highway in Baldwin County. Although much of the Georgia economy depends on logging, these accidents with logging trucks happen too often and, when they do, they are usually fatal. Although the details of this accident haven’t yet been made public, my guess based on my experience in handling these types of serious trucking accidents is that logs may have become unstable or lose and may have gone right through the Toyota Camry in which the child was riding. My heart goes out to the mother who was driving and to the child’s family. There is nothing as devastating as the loss of a child.

What could be scarier this Halloween?

Tonight on Anderson Cooper 360° prepare to hear a chilling story of lies and deceit as the story

of two everyday Americans are haunted by undercover agents in their own

Here in Georgia, Progressive Insurance Company has admitted to spying on its own insureds in a confidential church group.

Progressive Insurance Company hired two private eyes to spy on Progressive’s own insureds by infiltrating the couple’s private, confidential church group, lying about their identities and their motives, so that they might be able to find out some kind of personal “dirt” on the insureds so Progressive could use it against them in an uninsured motorist lawsuit. Progressive’s CEO has now “apologized.” And Progressive has the unmitigated gall to claim “it’s all about you” on their website!

It’s absolutely appalling and disgusting, but should give you a real life glimpse into the way insurance companies work to do everything in their power, including outright deception and invasion of privacy, to avoid paying legitimate personal injury claims. It’s sickening. The Progressive CEO said “What the investigators and Progressive people did was wrong – period,” Renwick, head of the third-largest U.S. auto insurer, said in a statement. “I personally want to apologize to anyone who was affected by this.” He apologized the day after the article exposing Progressive’s deception was published in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Sounds like to me the Progressive CEO was sorry they got caught, not sorry they engaged in fraud. This is made clear by the fact that Progressive continues to deny liability in a lawsuit brought against Progressive by the two insureds for invasion of privacy. Seems to me if Progressive was truly contrite it would simply admit the allegations of that lawsuit and take responsibility for its actions. But, as usual, it refuses to do so.

Teen cellphone use while driving is not illegal yet in Georgia, or in Metropolitan Georgia, but it should be. Too many teens are getting killed or injured, or killing others, while using the cellphone while driving. As a trial lawyer here in Metropolitan Atlanta, I see it all too often, usually while meeting with the grieving parents who have just lost their child at the hands of a teen driver. I have posted other blogs on this in the past, and it continues to be a subject near and dear to my heart, with a thirteen year old son who will want to start driving in a few years and who already is addicted to his cellphone.

I raise the issue again because California’s Legislature, in its wisdom, has banned Californians under age 18 from using cellphones, text message devices and laptop computers while driving. When signing the legislation, which goes into effect in 2008, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his own two daughters as examples: “I told my daughters: ‘I give you the car. I give you the cellphone, but if I see you one time using both at the same time, both of them are gone,’ ” he said.

Georgia should have a similar law. Teenagers are dying behind the wheel, and killing others, because of poor judgment. Yesterday in Savannah, a Georgia 17 year old was charged with vehicular homicide for the deaths of three other teenagers who were in his truck with him when he wrecked due to driving erratically. Nationwide, teen drivers have the highest risk of crashing out of any age group.