Atlanta Injury Lawyers Blog

It would have been much more effective to get in touch with an Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer, but the parent of a five-year-old child had other ideas. The father, Chris Cook of Bakersfield, California created a Facebook page deriding his son’s dentist after a nightmarish treatment procedure, during which, he alleges, the dentist extracted a tooth without the proper use of anesthesia.

According to Cook's Facebook page, the episode occurred last month at the clinic of a prominent dentist in the area. Cook alleges that the dentist didn’t wait for the child to be properly sedated before extracting the tooth. The child had a traumatic experience. He allegedly had to be held down by assistants, and vomited and urinated during the procedure, screaming the entire time.

What the father did next was vent on Facebook. He immediately created a Facebook page called “I Hate Dr. Dove of Bakersfield,” which quickly accumulated more than 400 members. Many of the members are concerned parents, who have used the Facebook post to vent about their own experiences with the concerned dentist.

According to some of the Facebook posts, the dentist has often mistreated child patients. Some of them spoke of him slapping and strapping children down to restrain them, and others spoke of a dentist who couldn’t be bothered to wait until a child was properly sedated before beginning a procedure.

Continue reading " Parent Launches Facebook Attack against Dentist " »

With the recent changes in immigration law, many immigrants in Georgia are shying away from utilizing the court system for fear of being deported. This is unfortunate and unwarranted because Georgia law is clear: evidence concerning a party’s immigration status is irrelevant to the issues of negligence and damages in a lawsuit. This type of evidence is highly prejudicial and has no probative force as to the issues involved. E.g., Evans v. State 433 S.E.2d 426 (Ga. App. 1993).

The admission of this evidence at trial would improperly influence the jury and result in a jury decision based on bias and prejudice, rather than on the relevant facts of the case.

In Georgia state court, admissibility of this type of evidence is governed by O.C.G.A. § 24-2-1. Evidence that is irrelevant to the issues at trial is NOT admissible. Evidence is relevant if it has a logical relationship to the fact to be established. In a typical personal injury lawsuit, the citizenship and immigration status of the plaintiff simply have no relevance to the issues at hand (typically liability and damages) and are only sought to be introduced by the Defendant to bias the jury.

In federal court, references to citizenship and immigration status are governed by Federal Rule of Evidence 402, which excludes all evidence that is not relevant. Relevant evidence is evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. FRE 401.

Evidence related to a Plaintiff's citizenship or immigration status is irrelevant and should be excluded by the trial judge in both federal and state courts in Georgia.

Not only are the issues of citizenship and immigration status inadmissible in Georgia trials, a recent federal court decision has held that this information is not discoverable during pre-trial discovery. Rodriguez v. Niagara Cleaning, No. 09-CV-22645, 2010 WL 2573974, at *3 (S.D. Fla. June 24, 2010). In the Rodriguez case, the Defendant attempted to discover pretrial information on the Plaintiff’s citizenship and immigration status. In denying Defendant’s motion to compel Plaintiff to produce this information, the Rodriguez court correctly noted “courts that have examined this issue have nearly unanimously found that defendants typically are not entitled to information related to the immigration status of plaintiffs.”

Continue reading " Citizenship and Immigration Status Often Not Admissible in Georgia Trials " »

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in twenty patients who are hospitalized for treatment, will contract a hospital-acquired infection such as MRSA. In spite of those scary statistics, patients in Georgia still do not have access to the kind of information they need to make a safe choice while choosing a hospital.

Georgia's laws do not require hospitals to share information about infections in their facilities. Hospitals are only required to notify Georgia's public health officials about an outbreak of an infectious disease like tuberculosis, but are not required to report infections that occur in patients who have been admitted into the hospital for treatment.

Atlanta medical malpractice lawyers hope that that will soon change. The Georgia Department of Public Health has kicked off a program aimed at preventing the kind of hospital-acquired infections that occur in Georgia's hospitals daily. The hope is that at some point, the system will also allow a statistical record of infections. However, all that is in the future, and currently, patients in Georgia have no way of ascertaining the safety of the hospital they are considering.

Continue reading " Atlanta Patients Don't Have Access to Essential Safety Information " »

A study recently published by the New England Journal of Medicine found that 1 in 5 medical malpractice claims results in recoveries. Some of the findings of this study are not surprising, such as: 1 in about 15 doctors are sued each year; that lawsuits on behalf of victims who are children result in higher recoveries; and that specialists are sued more often than general practitioners.

As a medical malpractice lawyer in Georgia, the study puzzles me because it fails to point out that only a fraction of the victims of medical malpractice file lawsuits or make a claim on the doctor's insurance company. The reason for this is simple: the cost to pursue a medical malpractice claim (i.e., expert witness fees and trial preparation fees) is so high that only the cases with the most egregious facts that result in catastrophic injuries can be brought by attorneys.

While these statistics may be accurate, it should be noted that most medical malpractice cases with merit are resolved favorably--if in the hands of a competent lawyer. These types of studies should not dissuade those who have been seriously injured in Georgia due to medical negligence from having their case reviewed by a competent lawyer who specializes in medical malpractice.

Continue reading " Atlanta Medical Malpractice Attorney Discusses Recent Study " »

A woman in Cook County, Illinois has filed a lawsuit against her dentist, claiming that he severely injured her lip during a procedure. That fact by itself would not have intrigued any Atlanta dental malpractice lawyer. However, according to the lawsuit, the dentist had been watching TV while he was performing the procedure.

According to the woman, the incident occurred on July 30, 2009, when she visited the dentist for a procedure. While the dentist was performing the procedure, he and a dental assistant watched a soap opera on a television set in the room. While he was distracted, the dental instrument burned a hole in her lip.

The hole quickly began to bleed. There was severe bruising, and the wound began to ooze liquid. When the effects of the dental anesthesia wore off, the plaintiff also began to suffer excruciating pain. When she informed the dentist about her pain, he simply prescribed an oral treatment to treat mouth sores.

Continue reading " Malpractice Lawsuit Claims Dentist Watched Soap Opera During Treatment " »

Sue Gorman was in her home when a neighbor's pit bill entered through an open patio door and started attacking Ms. Gorman's two Jack Russell terriers. When Ms. Gorman tried to pull the pit bull off her dogs, the pit bull attacked Ms. Gorman, who suffered multiple bites to her face and arms. Although it took four years for her case to come to trial, Ms. Gorman finally got her day in court--and was awarded $2.2M. As has been said many times, the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they grind fairly!

The jury assigned almost half of the legal blame to the County because animal control officials took no action against the owners of the dog, despite the pit bull being the source of more than a dozen complaints from neighbors.

Most local ordinances provide that an animal shall be properly restrained when in public and the violation of one of these "leash laws" is usually enough to establish negligence against the owners of a dog which attacks. This case was complicated by the fact that the County failed to act and issue proper citations when alerted of the prior animal code violations.

Continue reading " Dog Owner and County Liable to Victim in Pit Bull Attack " »

A dentist, who spent more than twenty-five years in prison after being convicted of the murder of three patients from improper use of anesthesia, has been paroled.

The case involving California dentist Tony Protopappas has interested Atlanta dental malpractice lawyers for a while now. Protopappas had a thriving dental practice in Costa Mesa. Everything was going great until 1980, when three patients including two women and a thirteen-year-old girl died after they had been administered anesthesia during dental treatment at his clinic.

In 1982, Protopappas was charged with three counts of second-degree murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He had been granted parole in 2008, but the parole was overturned by then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The governor based his decision on the fact that Protopappas had informed mental health evaluators that his staff, and not him, had been responsible for the deaths of the patients.

Last week, Protopappas officially exited prison. He has lost his dental license, and will never be able to start a practice again. But his lawyers says that he hopes to find a job working at a dental lab.

Continue reading " “Feel Good Dentist” Paroled from Prison " »