I am a former Buckeye and I guess things have not changed alot since I left in the mid-eighties. Then, as now, the Supreme Court prtected Big Business, while sacrificing the rights of individual citizens and, well, here they go again!

The Columbus Dispatch reports that in a 5 to 2 ruling the “justices” upheld caps on non-economic damages. The law limits the amounts injured victims can collect for “human damages” to a maximum of $350,000.

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Reports of three children fracturing their skulls after falling out of the popular foam Bumbo “Baby Sitter” seats have prompted the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to recall approximately one million of these seats. The CPSC has received 28 reports of young children falling out of the seats including the three who were seriously injured. Those accidents happened when the seats were placed on a raised surface such as tables or chairs. The CPSC notice says: “If the seat is placed on a table, countertop, chair or other elevated surface, young children can arch their backs, flip out of the Bumbo seat, and fall onto the floor, posing risk of serious head injuries.”

The chairs are constructed from a single piece of molded foam and come in a variety of colors. The seat wraps completely around the back of the baby and a crotch post at the center front forms two leg openings. The bottom is round and flat. The recalled seats were sold over the past four years, beginning in August 2003, at Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, Toys R Us, Babies R Us, USA Babies and at other toy and children’s stores nationwide, including online retailers, for about $40.

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Joe Camel and his Big Tobacco crew crash landed in front of the US Judicial Panel on Mul-District Litigation. Big Tobacco had sought to convince the panel that all cases filed or removed to federal court should all be sent to multi-district litigation.

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A horrifying story has come to public light due to the inexplicable overdosing of Dennis Quaid’s new born twins with a 1,000 times overdose of a very dangerous blood thinning drug called Heparin. According to an L.A. Times story the Chief Medical Officer at Cedars-Sinai, where the error occurred, called this “a preventable error”. Apparently someone mixed up vials of this dangerous medicine and mistakenly used 10,000 units per milliliter as opposed to the intended 10 units per milliliter. Amazingly Quaid’s twins were not the only victims. Apparently there were as many as 7 other children also overdosed. Fortunately, hospital staff noticed the errors and administered medication to reverse the effects of the overdose. Although hospital officials stated there was no harm to the children, they were admitted to the Neo-natal ICU. How does this happen and why are reasonable measures not taken to prevent this type of error?

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You go to your local pharmacy to have your prescription filled, just like you have a number of times before. You give the handwritten prescription to the young person behind the desk and they return with your prescription, complete with a label on the front and the pre-printed instructions in the bag. You take the prescription as directed on the label and soon you develop a severe headache. Without any warning you unknowingly have developed significant bleeding inside your brain and before very long you have suffered brain injury so severe that you cannot communicate or move most of your body. You find yourself severely brain injured and are incapable of caring for the three children you held so dearly.

This is what happened to one of my clients. It seems like such a small mistake; just an extra key typed. You probably think that a pharmacist fills your prescription when you bring it into your pharmacy. That’s not the case. The actual person filling your prescription is the pharmacy technician. Pharmacy technicians are essentially assistants or helpers to the pharmacists. Pharmacy technicians are not required to have any education at all. They simply must be 16 years of age in Florida to qualify to fill prescriptions in a pharmacy.

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Is the phrase, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” in the constitution? Popular belief is yes, but it is not actually in the constitution. Rather, this phrase comes from President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. It is probably a concept that should have been incorporated into the constitution and certainly Lincoln included it to remind citizens that it is their country. I think politicians, and even some of us, forget that it is OUR government and the politicians are OUR employees; they are supposed to be working in OUR best interests.

Business interests are fond of complaining about the jury system and regularly claim that it is “broken”, it needs to be “fixed”. Perhaps the best word is, in fact, “fixed”; they would like to fix the civil justice system so that it can be better influenced in their direction. Should we hold it against them because they work to achieve an unfair playing field? We should not hate Big Corporations for this, but should we allow them to achieve it? Absolutely not!

I think the jury system our founding fathers borrowed from English common law works just fine in protecting the rights of individual citizens. Frankly, I want six of my fellow citizens sitting and listening to evidence in my case. I want six regular people considering what makes sense and what does not make sense. I do not want a special panel appointed to hear my case, as has been promoted by many business “political parrots”. I do not want the government inserting itself into the civil justice system anymore than they already do. I trust an impartial panel of my fellow citizens to fairly weigh the evidence and reach a decision that makes sense.

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Proponents of tort reform continue to distort the facts of the McDonald’s hot coffee verdict in their ongoing nationwide attack on the civil justice system. Public opinion has been unfairly influenced by these distortions. The full story of this $2.9 million verdict needs to be told.

In the McDonald’s case, eighty-one year-old Stella Liebeck spilled a small cup of coffee while sitting in a car. She suffered third degree burns over 6% of her body. Her inner thighs, buttocks, genital area and groin were burned. She was hospitalized for eight days and required painful skin grafts and debridement. At the time of the spill, Mrs. Liebeck was trying to remove the cup’s lid to add cream and sugar. She was neither driving the vehicle nor was the vehicle moving.

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With Nearly 47 million Americans or 16 percent of the population without health insurance, many are flocking to health food stores to either supplement or replace expensive prescription medication with herbal medicine. Advertising tells us that “natural” is better and “herbal” is safer. Why put “drugs” in your body when you can use a safe, natural product?

Dr. Saul Green, a biochemist and board member of the nonprofit US National Council against Health Fraud, notes: Natural doesn’t mean safe. You can find a dozen or more poisons that are totally natural. Although natural made from natural ingredients, herbal medicines can cause serious organ damage and their carcinogenicity is comparable to synthetic chemicals.

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When does the Chinese calendar change? Soon, I hope. Forget about the Year of the Pig, 2007 is the Year of the Recall.

If you are looking forward to the upcoming holiday season, you’d better plan on doing a lot of standing around staring at your loved ones. The spate of recalls during 2007 may leave all of us with not much to do, no toys for the kids to play with and nothing to eat.

Today’s announcement that nearly five million Totino and Jeno brand pepperoni pizzas were being recalled because of e.coli contamination is just the latest damper on the festivities at year end. The Associated Press article notes that “General Mills voluntarily recalled eight kinds of Totino’s and three types of Jeno’s frozen pizza, which have pepperoni or other meat products” and that the food conglomerate is working with federal and state investigators.

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In reflection, one might legitimately ask the question:” has the adoption of the Florida Motor Vehicle No Fault Law in 1971 really achieved the goals it was intended for?”

If we simply accept the decision to do away with what we familiarly know as “PIP” (personal injury protection), then the answer is a resounding “no”. When the hatchet was to have fallen in October 2007 on PIP it was abruptly placed way back on the back burner.

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