Tag Archives: negligence

Do you always know what the recipients of your text messages are doing when you text them? An appellate court in New Jersey is considering whether text senders can be held liable when a driver reads a message and gets into an accident with a third party.   Duty Debate In Shannon Colonna’s case, the riders of a motorcycle reportedly sued both her and Kyle Best after Best crashed his pickup into them in Mine Hill, N.J., in September 2009. …

Soon after a jury awarded $6.5 million to a California man who claimed the diabetes drug Actos caused him to develop bladder cancer, a court erased the verdict. Jack Cooper , 79, on April 26 won the award against Actos maker Takeda Pharmaceuticals. His lawyer, Michael Miller, had asked to speed up the trial schedule because Cooper’s bladder cancer had metastasized. Cooper, a former cable-splicer for Pacific Bell Telephone Co., is a borderline diabetic and had taken the drug for five …

Rhino-maker Yamaha Motor Corporation must pay $3.3 million for an unsafe 660 UTV vehicle that overturned and crushed its driver. Jackie McMahon, of Pensacola, Fla., was driving the four-wheeler on a family farm in Alabama when she tried to make a right turn and the vehicle overturned on top of her, causing serious injuries to her limbs. She first filed suit in 2010, arguing unsuccessfully that the product was defectively designed. After losing the case she filed an appeal, and …

A $32.8 million verdict has been upheld against Cooper Tire for making and selling a defective tire that caused the driver of a van full of refugees to lose control near Bondurant, Iowa, and overturn several times, killing one woman and paralyzing another. Alfred Lang was driving a van carrying six passengers. The seven were refugees from Sudan who were sponsored by church organizations to immigrate here and were carpooling to work at a meatpacking plant in nearby Marshalltown. The left …

The family of a teenager killed while working at a marina in North Carolina in 2008 won a $1.5 million jury award against the manufacturer of equipment that it continued to use even after it was banned. Nate Coppick, 19, was refueling an 80-foot charter boat at the Westport Marina on Lake Norman, using a fuel nozzle with a latch that held the nozzle open. The nozzle malfunctioned and guzzled out 30 gallons of overflowing gas, causing an explosion that …