Connecticut Injury Attorney Blog

In Connecticut, sexual abuse continues to manifest itself in many and varied contexts producing grief and significant personal injury to the vicitms. The impact on those affected is well recognized in the medical literature to leave behind life long emotional and psychological scarring, significantly increasing the risk of depression and even suicide. Just last year my office resolved one such case involving a Connecticut licensed psychologist who was actually treating a married female patient for depression when he engaged in sexual relations with her. Due to the well known psychological dependency which necesssarily occurs in the course of mental health theraputic counceling the patient is rendered particularly vulnerable to their therapist and is perhaps the primary reason that a doctor/patient sexual or even social relationship is considered a breach of the physician's fiduciary duty to his or her patient. In this particular case, the patient wound up with a destroyed marriage, a weakened relationship with her children and ultimately tried to commit suicide twice before reaching a point of relative stability and acceptance. The result of the litigation and complaint brought against the health care provider in question is that he lost his license to practice in the State( and now sells insurance). Of course, there was a substantial settlement paid with part of the money coming from the doctor''s liability insurance company and part of it coming from his personal assets.

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A commerical dough mixer was determined to be a defective product by a hartford Connecticut Jury in April 2008. The Connecticut Jury also found that the manufacturer's failure to have placed on the machine in question a bowl guard which was only available as an optional piece of equipment warranted the assessing of punitive damages. A Punitive damages award is uncommon in the setting of a products liability lawsuit and is generally based upon the determination that the manufacturer or distributor's actions were taken with extreme indifference to the rights and safety of the products intended or forseeable users. In this case the manufacturer, Varimixer, had maintained a practice of selling large and powerful commercial dough mixers without having an interlocking bowl guard as a standard piece of safety equipment. It appeared to councel based upon information developed through discovery that the decision to only offer this safety device as a non standard piece of equipment available for an extra charge was commercially motivated and failed to take into account the potential for harm to the user should the mixer be used without the bowl guard. Based upon user experience throughout the industry, it was known that there would be a certain injury incident rate that would occur in the absence of the bowl guard's presence. The defendant's expert argued at trial that the injury incidence rate was small enough that making the bowl guard standard was not necessary in order for the product to be considered safe enough to use in accordance with the ordinary consumer's expectations of safety for the product. The Hartford Connecticut jury in this defective products personal injury case rejected that argument and found the manufacturer liable for both compensatory and punitive damages. The Compensatory damages award exceeded 1.3 million dollars. The case was settled for a confidential amount following the jury award last year.

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