With Little League and Babe Ruth baseball leagues in action throughout the country, a Pennsylvania legislator would like to see a ban on the use of aluminum bats in youth and high school games. State Representative Mike Carroll has introduced legislation mandating such a ban with the goal of preventing serious injuries. Carroll said in a Pocono Record story that lightweight, aluminum bats pose greater threats than wooden bats since they cause the ball to travel faster and farther. Carroll added that severe accidents and injuries are just waiting to happen with the use of aluminum bats. Major League Baseball does not use aluminum bats for safety reasons.

With similar intentions as this Pennsylvania legislation, the New York City Council will ban the use of metal bats in high schools beginning this September. The Pocono Record story added that nearby New Jersey is considering similar legislation as in Pennsylvania while Montana’s American Legion teams have banned the use of metal bats after a pitcher was killed by a line drive off of an aluminum bat. We’ll keep you updated on this legislation in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Under the impression that a jury deviated from settlements typical to similar personal injury cases, a Manhattan judge had reduced a $14.1 million verdict for a woman’s car accident injuries to $3.2 million. Lori Keating was struck by a cab in 2003 and left with leg injuries that required many surgeries, prevented her from working and limited her physical activities. After being awarded $14.1 million last year by a jury in the Manhattan state Supreme Court, Keating and her New York personal injury lawyer saw one of the highest personal injury verdicts for a Staten Islander be severely reduced yesterday. Justice Lottie W. Wilkins was described in a Staten Island Advance story as saying that she needed to find a balance between “the jury’s magnanimous impulses” and legal requirements that awards fall in line with verdicts in similar cases.

The story clarified that Wilkins essentially ordered a new trial on the amount of damages for pain and suffering that was originally awarded to Keating last year. Specifically, the jury awarded Keating $7 million for future pain and suffering, $5 million for past pain and suffering, more than $1.1 million for lost earnings and nearly $900,000 for medical bills. Her husband Kevin Keating was awarded $100,000 at the time for past loss of his wife’s services.

With that said, Wilkins let the awards for Keating’s husband, lost earnings and medical expenses stand. However, she reduced the awards for future pain and suffering to $500,000 and past pain and suffering to $600,000. Mrs. Keating has not accepted these terms, and the case has been appealed. We’ll keep you updated on the latest developments with this New York personal injury case.

Our affiliate, Total Divorce, took a place in blogging history yesterday by matching all donations made during the first day of the historic Blog Catalog Donors Choose movement to use social media for good.  Hundreds of bloggers across the country and even outside the U.S. have been blogging this week to encourage their readers to participate in the challenge, which allows donors to select specific elementary school projects to fund.

Read more about the Total Divorce donation here:

Total Divorce Joins Blog Catalog Fundraising Challenge for Schoolchildren Across America

If you’ve suffered a personal injury due to someone else’s negligence, you will likely hear from an insurance company in the days afterwards. The Injury Blog has detailed how insurance companies are not your friends and work with their bottom lines in mind when handling personal injury claims, and a recent Florida car accident verdict validates this point. After her insurance company offered her $10,000 for injuries that she sustained during a drunken driving accident, 61-year-old Joan Ruch was awarded $232,866.71 in her personal injury case against Donald Ray Clawson, a three-time convicted drunk driver who caused the accident. The lesson once again: don’t let insurance companies force you into rushed decisions when dealing with your personal injury claim, and rather enlist an experienced personal injury attorney in your area for more assistance.

On May 11, 2004, Ruch was involved in a four-person car accident that was caused by the 69-year-old Clawson. A Naplesnews.com story detailed that Ruch’s personal injuries included a herniated disk, chronic headaches and connective tissue damage. The personal injury lawsuit claimed that Ruch now suffers from chronic neck pain that will hamper her "golden years" and prevent her from working as an interior decorator. The story added that Clawson’s defense attorneys tried to minimize Ruch’s personal injuries and said that she could work again.

On Friday, a Collier Circuit Court jury awarded $180,067 in damages to Ruch, a former Fort Myers resident. Upon hearing that Clawson was convicted three times of DUI, the jurors added $52,800 in punitive damages. Ruch now lives in Georgia. Of further interest, her daughter Kimberly Carpenter was involved in the accident and originally awarded $1,050,979 for her neck injuries. The story added that a judge later reduced the $275,000 in punitive damages in that case to $25,000.

The “unofficial passage” of spring to summer occurs this Memorial Day Weekend, so enjoy your extra day off. If you decide to take your ATV vehicle out for a ride this weekend, please be careful. ATV accidents can lead to serious personal injuries and even death, as the case of Chandler Saylor depicts. The 16-year-old Saylor died in a South Carolina accident four years ago when he lost control of the vehicle and slammed into a tree. Just recently, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford vetoed a bill in honor of Chandler for the third straight year. Known as “Chandler’s Law,” this bill would have required children to wear protective gear when riding ATVs.

Sanford was quoted in a story in the online edition of The Times and Democrat as saying that such ATV legislation would infringe on the private property rights of people in the state by requiring them to take an ATV safety class with their kids in their own backyards. Proponents of this bill say that it is necessary to prevent more children from dying on ATVs. Chandler Saylor’s mother Pamela said in the story that three more children have died on ATVs in the state since Sanford’s veto last year. State Senator Brad Hutto added that he will mobilize fellow Senators to try to override Sanford’s veto.

South Carolina is not the only state to witness ATV safety legislation fall to the wayside this year. A Louisiana ATV safety bill that would have required children between the ages of 7 and 16 to take safety lessons and wear eye protection and a helmet in order to ride these vehicles recently failed in the state legislature. A KTBS3 story detailed that this Louisiana ATV legislation would have also banned children under six from operating an ATV and imposed fines of $50 to $500 for violators. Opponents to the legislation claimed that it would have punished parents riding ATVs with children on their laps while proponents said that it would have reduced the death and injury rate.

Despite these setbacks to ATV safety legislation, the need to understand proper riding techniques should not be discounted. Learn more about ATV safety at the ATV Safety Institute.

A man and woman seeking a combined $200,000 in damages in their Texas personal injury lawsuit against a driver who they said failed to yield the right of way and thus caused their car accident injuries was recently awarded a quarter of what they were asking for. Carl Skiles and Alicia Weaver claimed that they sustained a combined $70,000 worth of damages when defendant Michael Choate failed to yield the right of way in September of 2005 and then struck their vehicle. After a one day personal injury trial, a jury awarded Skiles and Weaver a combined $51,167 in damages on Tuesday.

An online story in The Southeast Texas Record detailed that Skiles was awarded $35,190 of the personal injury settlement, with his awards including:

• $10,000 for physical pain & mental anguish; 

• $1,500 for future pain and mental anguish; 

• $3,000 for past physical impairment; 

• $19,190.57 for medical costs;

•  $500 for disfigurement; & 

• $1,000 for property damage.

Weaver was awarded $15,977 with $1,440 of that accounting for lost wages. Both plaintiffs alleged in the personal injury lawsuit that Choate failed to properly look out into traffic and brake in time prior to the accident.

A proposed personal injury law that would let Illinois courts award monetary damages for suffering to the families of victims who were killed because of someone else’s negligence is waiting for a signature from Governor Rod Blagojevich. Illinois law currently forbids juries from considering emotional suffering during wrongful death cases. A Chicago-Sun Times story detailed how the measure would allow juries to consider the “grief, sorrow, and mental suffering” of the deceased victim’s family members during a wrongful death lawsuit. Senator Kwame Raoul sponsored this personal injury legislation and opinioned how it is wrong to not let juries consider these feelings of family members during wrongful death cases.

The story added that state Republicans have criticized this bill out of a fear that it will undermine the caps set in a 2005 Illinois law that currently limits wrongful death medical malpractice lawsuit judgments to $500,000 for doctors and $1 million for hospitals. At that time, lawmakers in favor of that law had argued that having no caps on medical malpractice awards was resulting in higher insurance premiums and forcing some doctors to leave the state.

This proposed Illinois personal injury law is thus challenging the 2005 law and would also create a new way for families to receive compensation in medical malpractice cases. This legislation passed the Democratic-controlled Illinois Senate by a 31-23 vote last week after being passed in the House  by a 63-52 vote in April. A Blagojevich spokesman said that the Governor has not yet decided whether he will sign the bill. We’ll keep you updated on the latest developments with this Illinois wrongful death legislation.

Last week, four brain injury patients and the Brain Injury Association of Massachusetts filed a class-action lawsuit against the state, Governor Deval Patrick and other state officials for being in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that the state of Massachusetts has failed to provide community-based care for brain injury patients and has thus required them to face a lifetime of nursing home confinement, which is against the law. A Boston.com story detailed how the lawsuit is not seeking damages for personal injuries but rather asking the state to implement a community care policy for all patients with brain injuries within five years.

Supporters of these brain injury patients have said that approximately one-fourth of the 8,200 patients in Massachusetts with severe brain injuries have requested community-based care, which would thus allow them to be with their families and still have access to caregivers. 54-year-old Catherine Hutchinson is one of the plaintiffs in this class-action lawsuit and wrote that being confined to a nursing home has made her “feel isolated from the real world.” Lawyers of the plaintiffs have cited similar statements echoing that Massachusetts brain injury patients have been left in isolation due to the state’s unwillingness to pay for community-based care.

In response to the lawsuit, state officials said that the state is committed to providing the best possible care for patients with brain injuries and is currently in the process of implementing new programs offering community care options for these types of patients. State officials also added that they have taken similar requests of brain injury patients in the past with great seriousness and disputed the notion that they did not care for their needs.

The Boston.com story added that the lawsuit seeks to represent all Massachusetts brain injury patients who are in nursing homes and then noted that a federal judge would determine who could participate in the suit. The story also detailed how this case may take years to be resolved in litigation. In the meantime, we’ll keep you updated on the latest developments with this issue.

An executrix has filed a personal injury lawsuit in West Virginia against 45 companies on behalf of the estate of a man who died from alleged asbestos exposure. A story in The West Virginia Record detailed the lawsuit’s allegations, including a claim that Melvin Cunningham Sr. died of mesothelioma which he supposedly contracted from abestos-related products at various power companies in 27 years. Patricia Paith filed the personal injury lawsuit against a long list of companies, including American Electric Power, Ohio Power Company and West Penn Company; all of which the deceased Cunningham worked for between 1966 and 1993. Melvin Cunnigham’s widow Angela is also listed as a plaintiff in the personal injury lawsuit. We’ll keep you updated on the latest developments with this personal injury case, which has yet to be assigned to a judge.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a story this week about a Washington woman whose story, though more dramatic than many, may be representative of a much more common practice in the insurance industry.

Tara Sadler sustained a serious injury in a minor car accident:  although the vehicles never made contact, her head snapped back, leading to a compressed spinal cord.  Her doctors said she needed surgery immediately, but State Farm, the insurance carrier, said no–they wanted their own doctor to determine whether the surgery was necessary.  That might not be unreasonable, but the fact that they scheduled the appointment for more than a month in the future, knowing that Sadler’s doctors considered the surgery urgent, certainly was.

In the end, State Farm’s doctors decided that the surgery was necessary, and the company made payment, but only after Sadler’s condition had deteriorated to the point that she now uses a wheelchair to get around and has lost much of the use of her right arm and leg permanantly.