Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog

Well, here we are again. I know I have been harping alot on this hot subject, texting while driving, but I have witnessed too many Georgians being needlessly injured because of a car wreck that happened because one of the drivers was texting while driving. I have personally experienced being cut off by another driver in DeKalb County because he was texting while driving, and it appeared to be a teenager driving mom’s car while he was doing it. I was able to avoid an accident narrowly.

Now, I am happy to see that the State of California has made it illegal to text while you are driving. Amen!! Georgia should be next! There are now plenty of studies that prove a person driving a car while talking on the cell phone is as impaired as a drunk driver. I can imagine that texting while driving, because you are required to be looking down at your cell phone, eyes away from the road, and you are using at least one hand (and I am sure some folks use both hands and steer with their knees) to type out a message, would even be worse than simply talking on the cellphone. Yet our government simply ignores this immense threat on Georgia roads.

You may have seen the news about the horrible commuter train wreck in Los Angeles, California recently. Turns out the conductor of the train was texting while driving the train! The engineer reportedly sent a text message a minute before the devastating crash to a teenage train buff he had recently befriended. Unbelievable! Twenty-five citizens lost their lives because of a text message. The repercussions for these poor families are enormous and tragic. And Georgia citizens are simply lucky something like this has not happened here yet. But it could, if we continue to ignore the threat of texting while driving. Hopefully, the Georgia Legislature in 2009, amidst all of their budget cuts, will take a look at this pressing issue and act.

This is a fair-minded debate about whether the driving age in Georgia should be raised. Today, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced its position that the driving age should be raised in all states as a safety measure. It is a known fact that car wrecks are the number one leading cause of death among teenagers. The research shows that if the teen driving age were raised, teen deaths in car wrecks would go down. Simple math.

As a parent of a fourteen year who will be driving in a year and the parent of an 11 year old (who thinks she is 15 already), I say “Amen!” I kid my son and his teenage friends all the time asking them if they have read in the newspaper that the Georgia General Assembly has raised the driving age to 18. At first they fall for it, incredulous looks on their faces, then it dawns on them that I am, once again, “pulling their legs.” It’s a fun pasttime. Of course, my attitude now is a far cry from my attitude I had about the issue when I was a 16 year old growing up in rural Kentucky. I grew up surrounded by livestock and crop farms, where many youngsters drove a pick-up truck on and around these various farms as long as it had “FARM TRUCK” emblazoned on it somewhere. “FARM TRUCK” was the secret code to police officers there was no need to stop the driver for underage driving because he was driving the truck with full immunity because it was a “FARM TRUCK!”

Of course, that was also in a town of 1800 people, not a city like Atlanta of 5 million. Big difference!

I am please today to report a $20.1 Million verdict in a motor vehicle accident wrongful death case against an electrical supply company and their employee driver. The verdict came back today from the Clayton County State Court jury.

The case involved a 62 year old school teacher who suffered broken ribs when he was rear-ended by an electrical supply truck. The teacher was stopped at a red light when the truck crashed into him. While hospitalized he developed an ilieus and subsequent complications. He ultimately aspirated and died.

As it turned out the truck driver was driving a truck during the day and working nights at Wal-Mart. He was only getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night. The defendant company violated transportation regs by failing to ask him about other jobs he might be working. It took the driver a grand total of 3 weeks working two jobs before he killed someone.

It is with great pleasure that I report to my fair readers that the Georgia Court of Appeals has affirmed a $1.3 Million wrongful death verdict against the Georgia DOT. The case, Baldwin v. DOT, involved the Georgia DOT’s failure to notice and fix a stop sign that was down for a length of time between two weeks and two months. The stop sign was supposed to be up at an intersection in Meriwhether County, Georgia at which one road had no traffic-control devices at all, and the cross-street was supposed to be controlled by the stop sign. You can readily imagine what happened. Mrs. Baldwin was driving down the road at which the stop sign was down on the ground, the intersection appeared to her to have no traffic control devices for her direction of travel and she continued on into the intersection. Unfortunately, another car was coming down the road she was crossing and struck Mrs. Baldwin’s car and killed her.

There was expert testimony that the DOT was required to do a weekly drive-through inspection of this intersection. One of the purposes of this inspection was to discover if a stop sign was down. The witnesses’ testimony showed that the DOT failed to discover the downed stop sign for at least two weeks and maybe as long as two months. The DOT’s failure to perform their duties caused the death of Mrs. Baldwin. I understand that prior to the trial, the DOT offered only $100,000.00 to settle the death claim.

Now, I ask you, as citizens of the State of Georgia: What was the DOT thinking? This is a sign of a severely broken DOT. The Georgia motoring public relies on the DOT to perform its job to keep the roads in Georgia safe and, as shown in Baldwin, are failing miserably. How many more Georgia citizens have to die before the Georgia DOT finally takes notice and starts doing its job?