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.

In the last few years, a number of high profile sexual abuse cases have made the news and gained public awareness of the problem. Members of the Clergy have been made to pay substantial settlements for their past and often remote behavior. Connecticut provides for a very generous statute of limitaions when allegations of sexual abuse are Deinvolved. Sometimes the abuse is perpetrated by family members or those that are in a position of authority and control over others,particularly children. Last year, my office resolved a case brought against the State of Connecticut's Department of Children and Family Services Several children had been placed in Foster care by this State agency and this resulted in a wide variety of abuse and neglect over an extended period of time. While initially denying that this was occuring and refusing to take remedial action such as promptly removing the children involved, the State ultimately did so and proceeded to defend the case brought on behalf of the children with vigor. Prior councel who had brought the case suffered a dismissal at the administrative level. My office corrected that and obtained permission to sue the State which we did. In fostering the substantial settlement obtained on behalf of the children, we were able to establish that connecticut case law would hold the State liable for the errors and neglect of their foster care parents chosen by them on the theory that the foster care parents were mere agents of the State who continued to have custody and control of the minor children placed in their care. That the State was merely delegating its non-delegable duty to care and protect these children . Particularly disturbing was the realization that there was a track record of significant deficiencies that were systemic and subject to a federal consent order which the State had not fully implemented. Therefore, it is important for private litigants to continue to come forward so both the embarassment and financial cost of tolerating this conduct promotes a higher level of care and oversight by those in the best position to bring this about.

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.

Our firm is interested in making sure that Varimixer as well as other commercial dough mixer companies such as Hobart for example have now begun a campaign to retrofit all dough mixers sold without the safety cage being included. While we were unable to require the retrofitting campaign to occur given the express finding of this jury it would be unreasonable for this company and the industry not to similarly conclude that adding on safety cages to these machines presents and unfair and avoidable risk of harm to those that use these machines in the workplace which covers tens of thousands of commercial kitchen workers nationwide. We are interested in following up on this issue and if necessary filing additional lawsuits on behalf of those injured by the commercial dough mixers through inadvertent contact with their hands due to the absence of the bowl cage guards.