The rock band Great White has entered into a settlement agreement for its role in the 2003 fire at The Station night club in Rhode Island.  They have agreed to a million dollar settlement. 

The defendants in the case are listed as the band members, their tour manager, Daniel Biechele, Manic Music Management Inc., and Knight Records Inc. Band member Ty Longley was among those killed.

One hundred people died in the inferno and about 200  others suffered injuries.  The inferno started when when Biechele lit the band’s pyrotechnics display in the West Warwick nightclub, sparking a flame that spread to foam insulation used as sound proofing. The foam acted as a fuel for the fire and a thick, black smoke quickly poisoned the air, making it a disaster within minutes.

Biechele admitted that he did not have a permit for the fireworks display and pleaded guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter.  He served two years of his 4-year prison term before being paroled.

The owners of the nightclub pleaded no contest to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter.  Michael Derderian  served four years in prison; Jeffrey Derderian received probation.

The fire was the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history and has so far resulted in about 175 million dollars in settlements.   Among those making settlements are the State of Rhode Island and the Town of West Warwick, each paying $20 million; Anheuser-Busch and a Rhode Island beer distributor,  each paying $21 million and several foam manufacturers agreeing to pay $30 million.

By settling these lawsuits, none of the defendants have admitted any wrongdoing.

Last week a federal judge in Brooklyn decided to unseal confidential documents produced by Eli Lilly about it’s anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa.  The judge, Jack Weinstein,  cited as reasons the health of thousands of people and fundamental issues about how drugs are approved for use.

The documents were produced by Lilly after patients sued because the drug had caused diabetes and extreme overweight.  Shortly after the suit was filed the documents were placed under a protective court order.

“Lilly’s legitimate interest in confidentiality does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure at this stage,” Judge Weinstein wrote.

The issue of confidential information arose in 2006, when New York Times reporter, Alex Berenson, wrote front page articles based on the contents of some of those papers.  He wrote that Lilly knew that Zyprexa had links to obesity and high blood sugar but kept that information from doctors.

Eli Lilly denied that they withheld such information and contended that the information that Berenson used was very carefully selected to give a one-sided view. 

U.S. District Judge Elden Fallon, the federal judge overseeing much of the massive Vioxx litigation, on Wednesday capped plaintiffs’ attorney fees at 32 percent. In doing so he stated that he wanted to ensure that attorney fees were reasonable. He also indicated that attorneys could recover reasonable costs.

The judge gave several reasons for the limit, noting the global settlement reached last November streamlined the work of the participating attorneys. He wrote that he had an increased responsibility to keep fees reasonable because most of the claimants are elderly and frail after having “suffered life-threatening injuries” — or they are survivors of people who died of a heart attack or stroke — so they may not have been able to negotiate the most favorable contracts with attorneys.

Merck & Co., the maker of Vioxx, pulled the painkiller from the market in September 2004 after its own research showed it doubled risk of heart attack and stroke. According to an AP article, there are 871 law firms involved in the litigation which started about the same time as Merck pulled the drug off the market.

Claimants who are part of the Settlement agreement will initially receive 40 percent of their final settlement amount. That will initially go into an escrow account until attorney fees and any medical liens such as Medicare have been deducted. Initial payouts will only be for those who suffered heart attacks. Claimants who suffered strokes will begin to see payments starting in February.

More than 44,000 of 47,000 eligible claimants have enrolled in the Program according to the Official Vioxx Settlement website. This is more than 93 percent. As part of the agreement Merck had insisted that at least 85 per cent of those eligible had to be registered.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court  has handed down a decision which, according to malpractice lawyers, will help patients who before the decision would  have had  little chance of collecting from doctors.

The ruling came about in a case where the patient, Kimiyoshi Matsuyama, 46 years old, had complained to the doctor about stomach pains.  He was diagnosed and treated for GERD, gastrointestinal reflux disease.  Diagnostic testing was never done until four  years later and the patient was found to have gastric cancer and died  five months after diagnosis. A Norfolk Superior Court jury had awarded his family a one million dollar judgement against his doctor, Dr. Neil Birnbaum and Dr. Birnbaum appealed.

The SJC recognized for the first time a doctrine known in medical malpractice cases as “loss of chance,” which allows a patient whose odds of recovery are 50 percent or less to receive damages for any negligence that reduced those odds. The court established a formula for juries to award damages proportionate to the reduced survival rate caused by the doctor’s negligence.

“Where a physician’s negligence reduces or eliminates the patient’s prospects for achieving a more favorable medical outcome, the physician has harmed the patient and is liable for damages,” the court said in a decision written by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall.

In 2002 Rachelle Jackson, a trained nurse, heard the sound of an auto crash while out walking. When she got there a police car had been hit when another car ran a stop sign. The driver of the police car was unconscious and the other officer was dazed. She pulled the passenger, Officer Kelly Brogan, from the car and helped her to a nearby stoop.

Police at the scene told Rachelle that the driver’s weapon had been stolen and asked her to go to the police station for questioning. Instead of being asked about the accident, she was accused of stealing the gun. She was held for two days with little to drink or eat until she agreed to sign a statement the police had prepared. She was charged and held in jail for ten months waiting for her trial. Her case was thrown out by a circuit court judge and in 2003 she sued the city of Chicago, Officer Brogan and the two officers who interrogated her.

In June, a federal jury found against the city and several officers. They awarded Rachelle 7.7 million dollars for false arrest, malicious prosecution, coercive questioning and intentional affliction of emotional distress.

On Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-3 vote, slashed a punitive punishments award against Exxon Mobil from two and a half billion dollars to about 500 million dollars. It is no surprise that this decision was applauded by business and decried by Alaskans and environmentalists.

This means that victims of the spill who filed a claim may expect to collect an average of $15, 000 each. Under the 2.5 billion dollar judgement they would have collected an average of $75,000 each.

Osa Schultz of Cordova, Alaska, said she was “pretty disappointed” with the amount of the settlement. “On the other hand, I’m relieved they slapped Exxon in the face,” Schultz said, adding that a $15,000 award wouldn’t even begin to cover the losses to her and her husband’s gillnet fishing business.

Justice David Souter wrote for the court that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses, $507.5 million, an amount equal to about four days worth of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s profits last quarter.

In an opinion dissenting from the Souter decision, Justice John Paul Stevens endorsed the $2.5 billion figure for punitive damages, pointing out that Congress has chosen not to impose restrictions in such circumstances.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also dissented, saying the court was engaging in “lawmaking” by concluding that punitive damages may not exceed what the company already paid to compensate victims for economic losses.

Exxon has been fighting to reduce or erase the punitive damages verdict by an Alaskan jury, a verdict reached because of the crash of the Exxon Valdez super tanker in 1989. That crash dumped eleven million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound fouling 1200 miles of coastline and leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and other marine animals.

This case looks to be all about whether the child was adequately watched. When you hand over your child to another for care such as this, the caregiver is many times subject to a higher level of scrutiny. We see this in many states with schools as well.

Timothy Burke was fine when his father dropped him off at the YMCA Childcare Center in Marblehead on the morning of June 9, 2005.

Even though his best buddy wasn’t there that day, Timothy, 3, happily played alone, filling a toy dump truck with mulch, pushing it across the yard and then emptying it. He ended up inside a playhouse built against the side of the Humphrey Street center.

No one’s sure what happened next, but about 15 minutes later, the little boy was found unconscious, face down against the back of the toy truck. Less than a week later, on June 15, his parents “reluctantly” made the decision to take him off life support.

Now his parents have filed a wrongful death suit against the Marblehead-Swampscott YMCA, six of its employees and Northshore Ambulance of Salem.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in Salem Superior Court, three years to the day after Timothy’s death, alleges that both the YMCA and its employees and the ambulance company and its workers were negligent. The suit charges that day care center employees failed to watch the child and, when they found him unconscious, failed to provide proper emergency care. It also charges that the ambulance company was negligent by failing to properly train its employees or provide them with proper supplies to treat the child. The ambulance workers never used a defibrillator on the boy.