Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

It is well known that Syracuse, Auburn, Geneva and other upstate New York cities are aging. Young people don’t stay because jobs are not easy to find here. As a result, the average age of people in cities like Syracuse, Auburn and Geneva is rising. We are getting old! And we’ve all heard those stories about elderly drivers who just should not be behind the wheel anymore and who end up causing terrible car accident injuries, for example, bowling down a bunch of pedestrians on a sidewalk, or crashing full speed into another car in the oncoming lane, or something like that.

Assume an elderly driver causes such a car accident in New York State. Assume further that the car the elderly driver was driving does not carry enough liability insurance to pay for all the personal injuries the elderly driver caused. What then? Is there anyone else to sue? What about the State of New York for having renewed the elderly person’s driving license? What about suing the family of the elderly driver for having allowed him or her to drive?

I’ll get to the answers in a minute. Bear with me. First I want to tell you why this topic is on my mind. I went for a ride with my 82 year-old mom the other day. She drove. My dad is the same age, but because of a stroke he had a few years ago, he no longer drives. My mom seems to drive just find, at least I thought so. But a day or two later, a friend told me that he was driving behind an elderly lady in Skaneateles, Onondaga County (where my mother lives) who looked very confused. She was at an intersection and was braking off and on, with no turn signals on, but then suddenly turned left, then pulled over. My friend then recognized the driver to be my mother.

The Syracuse Post Standard reported a strange vehicular assault case yesterday. A Camillus man, Christopher Spack, was killed when an elderly driver, William Levea, 79, of County Route 6, Fulton, deliberately rammed his car repeatedly into Christopher Spack’s pickup truck from behind while they were both driving on Route 370 in Cato. The repeated ramming caused Spack’s vehicle to cross over into the path of an on-coming vehicle. Spack collided with the on-coming car, was ejected from his pickup truck, and pronounced dead at the scene. He had dialed the Onondaga County 911 center minutes before the rear-end ramming started to report that he was being harassed by the car’s driver, whom he did not know. Cayuga County deputy sheriffs stated they did not know why Levea repeatedly drove his car into the rear of Spack’s pickup. Levea was charged yesterday with second degree murder, driving while intoxicated and reckless driving.

The criminal law system will punish Mr. Levea, we hope, with a long prison sentence (but since he is already 79 years old, any sentence he gets will probably not last long enough). But what about poor Mr. Spack’s family? How will they obtain compensation for their loss?

His family has the right to file lawsuit against Mr. Levea for the wrongful death and conscious pain and suffering of Mr. Spack. But unfortunately, they will probably get nothing for their trouble. Why? I’ll bet this Mr. Levea (the 79-year old vehicular assailant) has no assets to go after. People who drive drunk and intentionally ram their car into others almost by definition have “nothing to lose”, and therefore have no assets worth the trouble of going after.

Today New York Governor Patterson signed into law a bill making driving while intoxicated with a child (person under 16) in the car a felony, even for a first-time offender. If convicted, the offender could spend up to four years in jail. The new law also requires first-time DWI convicts to install an “interlock device” that blocks the engine from starting if the device detects, on the driver’s breathe, alcohol.

The bill picked up steam in the New York Senate after two New York car accidents in which children were killed by intoxicated adult drivers who crashed their car. In the first case, a woman drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway in Westchester County and killed eight, including her own 2-year-old daughter and three other children. In the second case, a young passenger was killed by a friend’s mother driving drunk. She flipped the car on the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan. The new law is called the Child Passenger Protection Act, also known as “Leandra’s Law”, named after one of the child victims mentioned above.

New York courts convicted 37,695 intoxicated drivers last year. Nationwide, 13,000 people a year die because of drunk driving.

Effective November 24, 2009, “child-restraint systems” (car seats and booster seats for kids) are required for ALL CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 8 (that is, through age 7). The law previously required this only for kids less than 6 years of age (through age 5).

What does this mean for parents? Don’t throw away your 5-year old’s booster seat – he will need it for two more years now.

While we’re on the subject, here are the other “child-restraint” requirements in New York:

We got a very large settlement ($7.5 Million) last year for a young man involved in an automobile accident in Cayuga County, near Auburn. The young man had gone out to a bar in Skaneateles with some friends. On their way home, the driver, who was somewhat intoxicated, lost control of the car on snow and ice and crashed into a tree. Our client, who was in the backseat and not wearing his seatbelt, suffered permanent paralysis.

Some of our friends were surprised we got so much since our client was not wearing his seatbelt. They said, “Isn’t a passenger required in New York to wear a seatbelt? If he wasn’t doing what the law required, why was he entitled to so much for his injuries?”

Whether a passenger is in the front seat or the back seat of a car, the defendant of the lawsuit has a right to argue, as a defense to the case, that the passenger could have “mitigated his or her damages” (legalese for “could have avoided getting injured so badly”) if he or she had been wearing a seatbelt.

TEXTING

Yesterday, Sunday November 1, just as we were turning our clocks back an hour, New York State’s anti-texting law went into effect. The new law prohibits using mobile devices behind the wheel for reading, typing and sending text messages. The penalty for violating the mobile-device law is $150. You can text that number by punching only 3 keys! Is this a good law?

From my vantage point, definitely. I just took in a Geneva, New York car accident case in a month ago, where a man was badly injured by a young lady who crossed the centerline of a road and hit him head-on near the city of Geneva, Ontario County, while texting. To add insult to injury, the insurance on the texter’s car had expired days before the accident. She had not bothered to renew it. The only recovery available to our client will come from his own “supplemental un/underinsurance motorist coverage“.