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transparenttriumphzombie · 3 years ago

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Transgender woman hopes suit against former employer will help othersFighting for Change: Part One, A New LifeTuesday, October 03, 2006By L.A. Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

First of a two-part series

Dannylee Mitchell was reborn on a Tuesday in April at the not-so-tender age of 40.

John Beale, Post-Gazette

Dannylee Mitchell stands in the foyer of her lawyer's Downtown office in March, before her surgery. "I think a lot of employers will see this and think twice, and it will make a difference," she said of her sex discrimination lawsuit. "They need to establish some policy."

Click photo for larger image.

Chat online about this story

Chat online with Post-Gazette staff writer L.A. Johnson about Dannylee Mitchell's journey tomorrow at noon. Go to

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Her journey to her authentic self took a long and circuitous route that was neither pretty nor smooth.

Four days after Christmas 2003, she crashed the Dodge Intrepid she was driving into the rear of a Ford Explorer parked on North Main Street in downtown Washington, Pa.

Stressed and depressed, she'd fallen asleep at the wheel in a company rental car. Police found her partially ejected from the car.

About two months earlier, she'd told her employer that she had a gender-identity disorder and would be transitioning from being a man to a woman.

"You don't know from the day you tell them you're transitioning whether you're going to have a job," says Dannylee, a Washington, Pa., native. "It weighs on you. You don't sleep. I was going on two and three hours of sleep a night."

Estrogen therapy was wreaking havoc with her emotions. Her family wasn't terribly supportive. She felt alone.

"I'd wake up at 2 in the morning, crying," she says. "I was just overwhelmed. Anxiety was at its peak."

Two days after the accident, on New Year's Eve 2003, she checked herself into Washington Hospital's psychiatric unit.

"I didn't want to go on anymore -- not a suicide attempt -- just exhausted," she says. "I was just burned out. Cooked. Done."

Severely depressed, she says she was having suicidal thoughts and spent a few days there under observation.

"It wasn't too long after I got out of the hospital that they fired me."

Dismissal of a salesman

Axcan Scandipharm Inc., a Birmingham, Ala.-based pharmaceutical company specializing in gastroenterology products, cited poor sales and inconsistencies in her reporting of the accident as reasons for her dismissal, she says.

Because she lost consciousness in the crash, she says she didn't realize there were two teenage boys in the Ford Explorer her car struck. All involved suffered minor injuries and were taken to the hospital from the scene. No one was charged in the accident, police said.

She believes she was fired because she told her employer she was going to become a transgender female. She filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against her former employer under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act.

In court records, Axcan Scandipharm maintains it did fire her in January 2004 for alleged willful misconduct but denies she was harassed by the company because of her sex and disability or suffered lost wages, emotional distress, embarrassment or humiliation.

The corporation's initial request to have the case dismissed -- arguing that Title VII protections don't extend to transsexuals -- was denied in February. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing the corporation's request for an interlocutory appeal. That means the 3rd Circuit could grant the appeal, taking up the case itself, or deny the appeal, sending it back to federal court for trial.

Axcan Scandipharm's lawyer, Philip R. Voluck, had "no comment" on the case when reached by telephone last week.

John G. Burt, Dannylee's attorney, believes the case has parallels to other historic civil rights battles.

"Once upon a time we said black folks were three-fifths a person. Once upon a time we said women weren't smart enough to vote," says Mr. Burt, who took the case on a contingency-fee basis. "People like Dannylee are civil rights pioneers. They didn't want to be, but they are -- like the pioneers that wouldn't move to the back of the bus, the pioneers who said women have a right to vote. Just ordinary folk trying to live their lives."

Daniel Mitchell joined Axcan Scandipharm in February 1999 as a salesman. His performance evaluations consistently indicated he met or exceeded expectations, according to the complaint. In 2002, he was promoted to the position of photodynamic therapy specialist, marketing a photodynamic therapy drug (activated by light) to hospitals in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey.

While his professional life was fine, his personal life was in turmoil. In August 2003, he found himself in the throes of a waning romance. His girlfriend at the time questioned his commitment to their relationship.

"She asked why did I have so much female attire in my travel gear?" Dannylee says. "She thought I was having an affair."

He wasn't. At that time, he simply felt free and safe to wear women's clothing only in hotel rooms when he was out of town on business. Her questions forced him to take serious stock of his life.

"It was a culmination of things, another failed relationship, my masculinity wasn't there in the relationship, always the question of whether I was gay," Dannylee says.

Right brain, wrong body

In September 2003, he went to the Persad Center, a licensed counseling center in Bloomfield serving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. There he was diagnosed as having a gender-identity disorder, specifically gender dysphoria. As cliched as it sounds, all of his life he had felt like a woman trapped in a man's body.

A month later, his girlfriend moved out while he was away at a business meeting. And Dannylee continued looking for answers.

"This was not about anything sexual or getting some sort of sexual pleasure," she says. "This is about gender identity and who you are. What your computer program is. What your brain is. You have your internal program, but it doesn't always run the peripheral equipment properly."

People with gender dysphoria feel "in their head and between their ears that they are the opposite gender," says Judith DiPerna, a clinical therapist and transgender specialist at the Persad Center. "That person feels comfortable and at peace when they're dressed as the gender they believe they are between the ears."

Dannylee participated in the center's gender clinic, which is designed to help people sort through their gender-identity issues. She participated in group and individual counseling, received estrogen hormone therapy under a physician's care and began living, working and dressing as a woman full time -- which all is standard protocol for someone planning to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

In mid-October 2003, Dannylee began presenting herself as female to her business accounts after having first informed them and her employer of her plans.

"I told them what was going to happen, had to talk to the vice president of the company, had to tell my workforce of about 15 to 20 people," she says. "They called some of the hospitals to see if they were OK with me coming in as a female."

She worried whether she'd lose her job if one of her accounts objected, though none did.

She says one supervisor essentially asked: "Wouldn't it be easier to go work somewhere nobody knew you? Wouldn't it be easier to just leave?"

According to the complaint, a manager also told her not to discuss her sex change plans with co-workers and to be low-key and to use a separate bathroom at a national sales meeting.

She legally changed her name in November 2003. By mid-month, her supervisor told her she'd have more frequent job performance reviews because of her disorder, according to the complaint.

She doesn't dispute that her sales volume was poor around that time, but says the sales of everyone in her division were poor. Up to that point, her sales record had been commendable. She says a manager suggested her sales volume was down because of her disorder.

In court records, the corporation denies these allegations.

After Axcan Scandipharm fired her on Jan. 12, 2004, she filed for unemployment and initially was denied benefits. She appealed the ruling.

Her personal problems continued to mount.

In February 2004, after going to retrieve her dog from an ex-girlfriend's house, she was arrested and held in jail for two days on breaking and entering and theft charges. Dannylee claimed her ex-girlfriend's son gave her the dog when she asked for it.

"They threw Danny in jail, and the cops were yukking it up," says Joan Hoop, a friend who initially started out as her electrologist in Washington, Pa., and agreed to the interview only with Dannylee's consent.

"She was starting to dress as a woman and didn't have her polish then, and they made the big scene about her now dressing as a woman. Put [her] in an orange jumpsuit, took [her] clothes and put her in a holding cell up there."

Dannylee lost custody of the dog and the charges were dropped on the condition that she pay court costs and not have further contact with her ex-girlfriend or her ex-girlfriend's children.

In March 2004, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which initially said it didn't investigate claims related to transsexualism.

Extremely depressed during this period, she did try to commit suicide this time: She attempted to drown herself in a bathtub and later spent more time in a hospital psychiatric ward.

"You don't have a family. You have no money. Not sure how you're going to get through this transition," she says.

Around this same time, she won her appeal and started getting unemployment benefits.

In November 2004, the EEOC reconsidered the case and still found a transgender person was not protected under existing law, thus clearing the way for the federal lawsuit, which was filed in February 2005.

"First, it started off as me being [ticked] off at the world," she says. "But now when I look at it, it could do a lot of good for other people," she says. "If someone doesn't follow the perception of what [someone thinks] male or female should be, you can't discriminate."

Daniel Mitchell, shown in high school yearbook photo, always felt there was something wrong in his life. It took years of heartache, depression and courage to make it right.

Click photo for larger image.

Portrait of a woman as a young man

Dannylee first realized she was different when she was 5 or 6 years old.

"I didn't feel like a boy. I didn't act like a boy," she says. "A lot of people said I had feminine features. My gestures were feminine. A lot of people assumed I was going to be a gay man."

Elsa Edwards, a kindergarten and high school friend, remembers Dannylee as being hysterically funny. The two, who were both witty and involved in theater, were voted "Most Unique" by their senior class.

"We defied categorization. Still do," says Ms. Edwards, 40, of Washington, Pa. "Danny always had such a sweet nature, always very kind, considerate, un-guy like, not aggressive, not pushy, didn't bully anybody, but got bullied a lot."

They lost touch a few years after high school graduation.

Dannylee earned a bachelor's degree in biology at Thiel College and considered going into nursing. She worked in medical research for several years, managed a pet store for a national chain, worked for a national pet supply company, sold eyeglass frames in Philadelphia and New Jersey, then moved back to Pennsylvania in 1997, landing the job with Axcan in 1999.

Twice married -- in 1989 and 1996 -- when she was still living as a man, she tried being macho in relationships.

"That led to disaster after disaster in relationships, relationship failure and divorce because I 'wasn't man enough,'" she says. "I thought something was wrong with me and that love would cure me."

She now believes the only thing "wrong" with her was that she spent the majority of her life trying to be someone she wasn't.

Dannylee reconnected with her old friend, Elsa Edwards, in August 2004 at their 20th high school reunion.

Ms. Edwards remembers seeing a very attractive woman in a red dress and heels across the banquet hall. It took her a few seconds to realize that woman was the Danny she knew in high school.

"A lot of people didn't have a clue. They'd say 'Hi' to me and then they'd look over and say, 'Who is this?' and I'd say, 'Oh, you remember Danny,' and the jaws would drop," Ms. Edwards says.

After people got over the initial shock, they actually were very sweet, she says.

Ms. Edwards doesn't believe Dannylee's desire to transition was some flight of fancy, because Dannylee was always very deliberate.

"When I remembered Danny from high school, I could tell there was a lot of hurt there but a really courageous kind of sense of trying to do things that would work, trying to make things work," Ms. Edwards says. "I think Danny must have tried really hard to fit in to what people expected, but couldn't because it wasn't right for her."

Near broke and still emotionally fragile in the late fall of 2004, all Dannylee could do was continue to concentrate on becoming the woman she'd always felt she truly was.

It was time to correct what she called a "birth defect," that "deformity" between her legs.

TOMORROW: Making the transition from male to female.

First published on October 3, 2006 at 12:00 am

#transgender #transgender woman #transwoman #postop transwomen #transwomen

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natesafety · 3 years ago

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OSHA Begins the Process to Issue Heat Illness Standard for Indoor and Outdoor Workplaces

Seyfarth Synopsis: OSHA is initiating a rulemaking to develop a heat illness standard.

For decades, federal OSHA has enforced occupational heat illness hazards through the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s General Duty Clause. OSHA has recently updated its Heat Illness Prevention Campaign materials to recognize both indoor and outdoor heat hazards, as well as the importance of protecting new and returning workers from hazardous heat. As OSHA continues to shift its enforcement focus to heat, it has begun the process to issue a heat illness standard. On October 27, 2021, OSHA issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) for the proposed standard.

The ANPRM provides OSHA’s overview of the issues concerning heat stress in the workplace and of measures that have been taken to prevent it, and seeks input from stakeholders on a number of questions during a designated notice-and-comment period.

According to the Agency, heat is the leading cause of death for all weather-related phenomena. Excessive heat exacerbates existing health problems like asthma, kidney failure, and heart disease, and can cause heat stroke and death if not treated. OSHA cites the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, declaring that exposure to excessive environmental heat, that has killed 907 U.S. workers from 1992- 2019, with an average of 32 fatalities per year during that period. In 2019, there were 43 work-related deaths due to environmental heat exposure. The BLS Annual Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses estimates that 31,560 work-related heat injuries and illnesses involving days away from work have occurred from 2011-2019, with an average of 3,507 injuries and illnesses of this severity occurring per year during this period.

The ANPRM examines the four state plans with heat illness regulations (California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington), clearly showing an intent to model federal regulations on those deemed to be successful. Notably, none of the four pre-existing heat regulations agree on the appropriate threshold for determining what constitutes “hazardous” levels of heat. The ANPRM uniquely targets (1) the effects of climate change on occupational health, and (2) the inequitable effects of heat illness on disadvantaged demographic groups. OSHA provides data addressing disproportionate heat illness affecting minority employees, foreign born employees, low-wage-earners, and pregnant employees.

OSHA also notes that a large percentage of heat illness incidents occur in very small businesses with 10 or fewer employees.

A hurdle OSHA faces in developing a standard is that small businesses will have difficulty implementing both new engineering controls (air conditioning, providing shade) and administrative controls (closely monitoring the heat exposure of employees, cooling breaks because of limited employees, lengthy periods of acclimatizing to heat prior to beginning work).

Public comments on the ANPRM are requested on or before December 27, 2021. A heat illness standard could be the final outcome of this process, and interested parties should consider submitting comments to make sure their voices are heard during this rulemaking.

We have previously blogged on heat stress in the workplace. See “Water. Rest. Shade.” OSHA Campaign to Prevent Heat Illness in Outdoor Workers, Cool For the Summer, Avoid the Summer Heat! Sweat the Details of California's “Cool-Down” Periods and Avoid the Burn of Wage and Hour Class Litigation, and Cal/OSHA Drafts Rules for the Marijuana/Cannabis Industry and Heat Illness Prevention in Indoor Places of Employment.

For more information on this or any related topic, please contact the authors, your Seyfarth attorney, or any member of the Workplace Safety and Health (OSHA/MSHA) Team. ●

Seyfarth Shaw LLP Workplace Safety and Health (OSHA/ MSHA) Team: James L. Curtis Benjamin D. Briggs Adam R. Young Patrick D. Joyce A. Scott Hecker Ilana Morady Daniel R. Birnbaum Craig B. Simonsen

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feimineach · 7 years ago

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No group had ever picketed the White House before, according to Jennifer Krafchik, Acting Director, Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. Many viewed women picketing during wartime as unpatriotic, so the police arrested 70 women on November 14, 1917. Given the choice of a $25 fine or incarceration, they chose jail. “Not a dollar of your fine shall we pay,” protested National Women’s Party co-founder Lucy Burns. “To pay a fine would be an admission of guilt. We are innocent.”

Officers then hauled the women to the Occoquan Workhouse, 25 miles south of Washington in Lorton, Virginia, where jailers fed the “law-breakers” maggot-laden food and stripped, dragged and clubbed them before they housed them in rat-infested cells alongside drunks and thieves. Guards manacled Burns by her hands to the overhead cell bars, forcing her to stand all night. When some of the suffragists went on a hunger strike, jailers force fed them raw eggs and milk through a tube inserted into their nasal passages. The women called this the “Night of Terror.”

Public exposure of the male guards’ abusive treatment galvanized public support for suffrage and created sticky political discomfort for Wilson, who still stonewalled. In 1918, he finally proposed that Congress pass the Susan B. Anthony amendment guaranteeing women suffrage as “a necessary war measure.” (To pressure Wilson to actively advocate for the amendment, the women built “watch fires” in Lafayette Park and burned his speeches.)

Five years earlier, 8,000 “uppity” women had upstaged President-elect Wilson’s inauguration when they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying banners proclaiming “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Their leader, attorney Inez Milholland, wearing white robes astride a magnificent white horse, invoked Joan of Arc. People on the sidelines, mostly men, hurled jeers and nasty insults, deriding these dogged women as “unwomanly,” “unsexed” and “pathological.” About 100 marchers were hospitalized after suffering injuries from the hostile onlookers. When Wilson disembarked at Union Station, disappointed at the size of his own greeting party, he asked where everyone was. “On the avenue,” came the answer, “watching the suffragists’ parade.”

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jeffreylawfirm · 4 years ago

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If your loved one have been hurt in an accident in Renton.Our Renton Personal Injury Attorney at Caffee Accident & Injury Lawyers will be ready to help about your rights, legal options & what compensation is available to you. Call today at (206) 899-5415.

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caffeelawfirm · 4 years ago

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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“All Hell Broke Loose.”

When Kishon McDonald saw the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of four officers from the Minneapolis Police Department, he could tell it was going to turn the country upside down. “I knew it was going to catch fire,” he said. McDonald, a former sailor in the U.S. Navy, watched over the following days as demonstrations against police brutality spread from Minneapolis to cities and towns across the country, eventually reaching Washington, D.C., where he lived. On June 1, he heard that people were planning to peacefully gather at Lafayette Square, a small park directly across from the White House, and decided to join them. By then, police had begun to attack and beat demonstrators in Minneapolis, New York, and others in states everywhere, escalating tensions as smaller groups broke into shops and set fire to police cars. But when McDonald arrived at Lafayette Square, he found a crowd of a few thousand people cheering, chanting slogans, and listening to speeches. Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had imposed a 7 p.m. curfew after clashes the night before, but that was still an hour away. “Everybody there was like, it’s alright, we’re going to be here until 7 o’clock,” he said. “It was a very good energy.” It wouldn’t be long before that would change.

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

In the days following George Floyd’s murder, President Trump had focused his attention on the relatively small number of people who had damaged property, threatening to use the “unlimited power of our military” and tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” What the protesters gathered in Lafayette Square that day didn’t know was that he was planning to stage a photo opportunity at a nearby church that evening. Unbeknownst to McDonald, as he and the others chanted “hands up, don’t shoot,” the U.S. Park Police and other law enforcement agencies were just out of sight, donning riot gear and checking the weapons they would shortly use against the crowd to pave the way for the president’s walk to the church. At 6:30 p.m. — half an hour before Washington D.C.’s curfew — dozens of battle-clad officers rushed the protest, hurling stun grenades and firing tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and pepper balls into the crowd. McDonald says there were no warnings, just an onslaught of violence. “All hell broke loose,” he said. As the deafening explosions from the stun grenades gave way to thick clouds of tear gas, terrified protesters began to run from the batons and riot shields that police were using to force them out of the square. “It was just straight fear. Everybody was scared and running for their lives,” he said. McDonald tried to plead for instructions from the advancing officers, asking them what they wanted people to do. Instead, one threw a stun grenade at him. “As it exploded, hot shrapnel hit my leg,” he said. “It felt like somebody put a cast iron skillet on my leg, it was just so hot. I started jumping up and down trying to get away from it, but shrapnel was going everywhere.” Suffocating tear gas enveloped him and the other protesters, making them gasp and cough as they ran down the street. “I saw a young boy, he must have been about 15, and he was choking a lot. Somebody put a shirt over his face and kind of ran him out,” he recalled. McDonald had seen enough. Bruised from being hit with riot shields and with his vision still blurred from the tear gas, he walked home. In a phone interview with the ACLU, he said that the experience had made him more wary of attending protests, but it also illustrated why he’d gone there to begin with. “It seems like everything is getting to be a military type thing in our society, and we were protesting to calm that down,” he said. “And the message we got is, ‘No, we aren’t calming down.’” “I hope someone gets held accountable,” he added.

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Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Americans poured into the streets to voice their condemnation of police brutality against Black people. The weeks that followed were a milestone in American history, with protests and displays of solidarity reaching towns as small as Cadillac, Michigan, and cities as large as Atlanta. As months of a painful COVID-19 lockdown gave way to incandescent fury over the killing of Floyd and the violent response of the Minneapolis Police Department towards the initial protests, a few people went as far as burning police precincts or destroying upscale shopping districts. The vast majority of protests, however, were almost entirely peaceful. Still, police departments across the country deployed staggering levels of violence against protesters. On social media, the world watched a near-instantaneous live feed of police in dozens of cities firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and other projectiles into protests, using pepper spray against protesters and journalists alike, and beating people with batons. This widespread and indiscriminate deployment of what are often called “less-lethal” weapons – LLWs – injured countless people, some severely. In Austin, Texas, 20-year-old college student Justin Howell suffered a skull fracture after being shot in the head with a “beanbag round” filled with lead pellets. Linda Tirado, a journalist and photographer, lost her left eye to a “rubber bullet” fired by police in Minneapolis. In Seattle, 26-year-old Aubreanna Inda nearly died after a stun grenade exploded next to her chest. According to Carl Takei, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality who focuses on police practices, this widespread and violent use of LLWs during the George Floyd uprising was an attack on the protesters’ constitutional right to free speech. “There’s just no justification under the existing Fourth Amendment framework for the use of these weapons,” he said. “And it’s happening over and over again, with patterns that are so similar across the different cities.” For years these weapons were referred to as “non-lethal.” But in practice, they have a long history of causing serious injuries and deaths. A 2016 report by the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations analyzed 25 years of available data on the use of LLWs by law enforcement across the world. It found that between 1990 and 2015, “kinetic impact projectiles” — a category that includes rubber bullets and beanbag rounds — caused at least 1,925 injuries, including 53 deaths and 294 instances of permanent disability. Tear gas, which is banned for use in warfare under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, injured at least 9,261 people over the same time period, including two deaths and 70 permanent disabilities. The report also found that LLWs are most commonly used to stamp out political protests and shut down aggressive demands for greater rights. According to Takei, even the term “less lethal” downplays the damage they can inflict. “Beating somebody with a baseball bat, as long as you’re not hitting them in the head or other sensitive areas of the body is ‘less lethal,’ but it’s still incredibly violent,” he said. During the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s, police used tear gas and other LLWs extensively to disrupt and disperse protests. But after three federal commissions found that abuse of those weapons provoked aggressive responses by protesters and contributed to a cycle of violence, they fell out of favor with U.S. law enforcement as a method of controlling crowds. According to the Marshall Project, in subsequent decades, some police departments adopted a “negotiated management” approach to protests, working with organizers in advance to establish ground rules meant to prevent violence. But any movement toward de-escalation evaporated in the wake of large anti-globalization protests that took place during a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, in an event that would come to be called the “Battle for Seattle.” In a prelude to how many police departments would later approach the George Floyd uprising, Seattle police attacked the mostly non-violent protesters with LLWs, provoking a handful to respond aggressively in kind. “The response of a lot of police departments after that was, well if some people won’t act as predicted, we should have a hyper-aggressive response for everybody,” said Takei. “But when police adopt this type of response to Black-led protests against police violence, they are repeating a pattern of brutality that goes back to the origins of American policing in Southern slave patrols.” Now, as outcry over the indiscriminate use of LLWs against Black Lives Matter protesters mounts, some municipalities are weighing restrictions on the weapons. After the ACLU sued the Seattle Police Department in early June for its violent response to protests in the city, a judge ordered police there to cease using the weapons against peaceful demonstrators, saying they had “chilled speech.” Days later, Seattle’s city council voted unanimously to prohibit their use against protesters. Legislators in Atlanta and other cities have also proposed similar bans. The ACLU spoke to a number of people who were attacked with LLWs by police during demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder in recent weeks. This is how they described their experiences.

****

Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

Gabe Schlough wasn’t surprised that the Minneapolis Police Department had killed another one of its Black residents. He lives in Denver now, but he’d gone to college years earlier in Minneapolis. Just before he graduated, he’d been shot in the back with a stun gun by police who entered his home and tried to arrest him in a case of mistaken identity. Schlough had been invited to a protest at downtown Denver’s Capitol Building that night, but instead he decided to drive his motorcycle up into the mountains with a friend. “In one of the areas where people were hiking and snowboarding and skiing down I saw three Black people, and I was just fucking happy,” he said. “I was like, thank God not every Black person thinks they need to be at the Capitol right now.” But when he got back home later that night and saw images of the Denver Police Department’s response to the protest, he felt his blood start to boil. “We can’t even give doctors and nurses facemasks, but we can give our police access to militarized weapons that are exceedingly more expensive and hard to create than the protective mechanisms we need for health care workers,” he recalled thinking. Schlough has a degree in public health anthropology, and he’d worked in health care across the world, including a stint in an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone. He had medical training and had participated in protests before, so he decided to defy the curfew along with a few friends to see if he could offer help in case anyone got hurt. Donning his face mask along with sunglasses to protect his eyes, Schlough set off towards the Capitol Building. When he arrived, he saw a crowd of two or three hundred people facing down a line of police. “They were standing just a little bit more than shoulder to shoulder apart with full riot gear, with their face shields and full protective armor on,” he recalled. Schlough moved up toward the front of the crowd. Behind him, somebody set a pile of garbage on fire. That was all the police needed to begin their advance. As they moved forward, they shot canisters of tear gas into the crowd and tossed stun grenades. “I was going around and telling people who didn’t have eye coverings to watch their eyes and protect their face,” he said. “Just running up and down the line and getting people educated, like this is happening and this is what you need to know.” As a canister of tear gas landed next to him, Schlough bent down to try and cover it with a traffic cone so the gas wouldn’t spread. Suddenly, he felt sharp blows to his face and chest. “A shock hit me and my head popped up,” he said. “I felt like somebody had punched me in the chest.” Schlough had been shot with rubber bullets, although he didn’t know it yet. As he fell back further into the crowd of protestors, someone told him he was bleeding. “You need to go to a hospital,” they said. “Your face is falling off.” Another bystander pulled out his phone and showed Schlough his injury. The bullet had left a gaping wound on his chin, and blood was pouring down onto the front of his shirt. In retrospect, Schlough says he thinks he was specifically targeted, and that police knew exactly where they were aiming when they shot him. He and a friend left and started walking toward a nearby hospital where he did volunteer shifts. But when they arrived, Denver police were also there. “There were cop cars there and more pulling up, and I understood that it was not a safe place for me to get treated because of the amount of police presence there,” he said. Instead, Schlough had to drive outside Denver to be treated at a different facility. Doctors cleaned his wound and gave him 20 stitches. More than a week later, part of his chin is still numb. He worries that he may have suffered nerve damage. Last Christmas, while visiting his mother in Wisconsin, he says one of her friends asked him what the most dangerous place he’d ever been was. “I told her that I’m the most scared when I’m in the U.S. and around a police officer,” he said. “Because I know that no matter who I am or what I’ve done in my life, I can be shot and killed, and nothing will matter.”

****

Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

Toni Sanders arrived at Lafayette Square along with her wife and 9-year-old stepson in the late afternoon of June 1 – the same day that Kishon McDonald was there. Their son — identified in court papers as J.N.C. — had been watching the news over the preceding days, and the family had been having difficult conversations about George Floyd and why there was unrest rocking the country. “We spoke about Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Tamir Rice, and people right here in D.C. who had been killed by Metropolitan Police — Raphael Briscoe, Terrence Sterling, Marqueese Alston, and explained to him that was why people were protesting,” Sanders said. He said that he’d like to accompany Sanders and his mother to Lafayette Square. “I assured him that it would be safe because it was a peaceful protest and that we would leave before the curfew started,” she said. At first, she was glad that she’d agreed to bring him to what felt like a “community environment.” People in the square were passing out snacks, chanting, and kneeling in solidarity with George Floyd. “Everything started out wonderful, it was a great experience,” she recalled. “We even took a picture when we first got down there just to remember the date we all stood together.” Then, the attack began. “I just heard the loud bah bah bah bah, and smoke started to fill the area.” Sanders was immediately terrified for her young stepson. “I just started screaming to my family, run, run, run,” she said. The three sprinted away from the sound of detonating stun grenades and the shrieks of injured protesters. After making it a few blocks away, they stopped to catch their breath and check in with one another. “He said, ‘I can’t believe I just survived my first near-death experience.’ And it literally broke my heart because there’s honestly nothing I could say to him. I couldn’t tell him this wasn’t a near-death experience.” Sanders was furious that police hadn’t warned protesters to disperse before violently clearing the park. If they had, she said, she would have quickly brought her stepson to safety. “If we had been asked to either move back or leave, we would have. We would not have protested that because we have a child that we must look out for,” she said. After the attack, Sanders’ son expressed anger and hurt over how police had treated them. Sanders had refused to allow the experience to scare her away from attending protests, but now when she left the house he would ask her to promise that she wouldn’t die. “I wanted to show him that even though you’re afraid, if someone is trying to take your rights and do you wrong, you have to stand up for who you are and what you believe in,” she said. The couple decided to put him into therapy to work out how that day affected him. Sanders says he told his therapist that he thinks that it’s the end of the world now, and that the government is at war with Black people. “Now we have to have uncomfortable conversations with him about systemic racism, overt racism, covert racism,” she said. “And it’s horrible to have to take that innocence from him.” Along with Kishon McDonald, Sanders is one of two plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit over the attack on Lafayette Square protesters that day. Over the phone, she recites the poem ‘If We Must Die’ by Claude McKay. We’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! “We’re here to show you that we’re still citizens, and we’re going to exercise our rights, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

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Alexandra Chen, a law student at Seattle University and a plaintiff in the lawsuit Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County v. City of Seattle, poses for a portrait in Seattle, Washington on June 15, 2020.

David Ryder for the ACLU.

On May 30, first-year law student Alexandra Chen marched to a police precinct in downtown Seattle along with a few hundred other demonstrators. It was the second protest she’d attended, the first being the day before. When they arrived at the precinct, there were police in riot gear out in front, with others standing in the windows and watching the crowd from above. “People were clearly agitated, but I didn’t see anyone really try to push the ticket,” she said. “Folks were just crowding around and leading chants.” A few scattered water bottles along with a road flare were thrown at the precinct, but aside from that, Chen said nobody in the crowd was signaling that violence was coming. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘You know, this would be a great opportunity for someone to come out with a megaphone and make a statement about how you understand why we’re so angry and you want to work with us on how to fix this,’” she said. Instead, just like in Washington, D.C., Denver, and dozens of other cities, the Seattle Police Department began to throw stun grenades and tear gas into the crowd. “There was no warning at all,” she said. “It was just absolute chaos.” When the first stun grenade detonated near her, she felt a “deep percussive feeling” in her chest. People began to scream and run as tear gas filled the street. As she and her friend tried to move away from the precinct, she noticed another young woman desperately trying to find fresh air. “There was a gap in a wall that was about six to eight inches between buildings, and she was trying to escape the gas. It looked like she was trying to crawl into that space, and you could hear her retching,” she said. Tear gas is by its nature indiscriminate. It can’t be controlled or targeted to incapacitate specific people. As soon as a canister or grenade is launched, it becomes the property of the wind. Young and old alike are subject to its effects, which Chen says go from “uncomfortable to intolerable in a short amount of time.” Chen says that when the group first arrived at the precinct, nearly everyone was wearing masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But after the tear gas was fired, people began to rip them off as they choked, coughed, and gasped for air. “First, you think to yourself, “Okay, I can tolerate this,’” she said. “You don’t really expect that it’s going to get worse, but it does. It moves deeper into your face and once it gets into your sinuses, everything it touches burns.” All around her, people were calling out for their friends and loved ones through the thick smoke. “It was hard to tell which direction to run because when they threw the canisters, they rolled down the hills spewing tear gas the whole way. So effectively, you had not just the immediate area in front of the police station gassed, you had the whole block, and when you’re in the middle of it, you can’t tell where it ends,” she recalled. After Chen and her friend emerged from the cloud, a medic nearby helped flush her eyes out with water, and the two walked back to her apartment. She is now a plaintiff in an ACLU lawsuit brought against the Seattle Police Department over its use of tear gas and other LLWs. “I don’t care what they want to say about how people are violent,” she said. “What I saw was peaceful protesters met with an immediate and overwhelming show of force to get us to disperse.”

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Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Jared Goyette moved to Minneapolis five years ago to be close to his daughter. As a journalist, he’d covered protests over police brutality before — first at the Mall of America during the Ferguson uprising, and then later after the killing of Philando Castile. Over the years, he’d developed ties to the city’s activist community, and in the hours after the video of George Floyd’s murder was released, his phone began to buzz. “I started getting texts from different Black activists in the Twin Cities,” he said. Goyette could tell that Floyd’s killing would lead to unrest, and before long national news outlets began reaching out to ask for his help covering the story. On May 27th, two days after Floyd’s death, Goyette heard the sound of helicopters buzzing over the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct. The Precinct had already become a flash point for demonstrations, and Goyette decided to head to the area to see what was happening. “When I started surveying the scene, it was entirely different from anything I’d seen in my previous years of covering protests against police violence in Minnesota,” he said. Several hundred people had surrounded the precinct, and officers in riot gear were standing on the roof firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them. Goyette had his camera and notepad with him and, along with other journalists there, was visibly covering the standoff in his role as a reporter. He saw that a young man had been shot in the head with a ballistic projectile, and moved towards him to try and see if he could do anything to help. “He was just writhing on the ground in clear, severe pain,” he said. “People were screaming, ‘Call 911.’” Goyette noticed that his ten-year-old daughter had texted him to ask where he was, so he moved off to the side to text a response. Suddenly, he was on the ground. “There was a searing pain in my eye,” he recalled. “It wasn’t like I was hit and then I fell, it was like I’m standing and then wait, I’m not standing and everything is black.” Goyette had been shot in the head with a rubber bullet. His nose was bleeding and his eye was swollen and black. People moved towards him to help, but tear gas began to flood the area.

Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

Listen to this episode

He managed to woozily make his way to safety, and after gathering his composure for a few minutes, found his car and drove home. Initially, he didn’t think he needed medical attention, but his girlfriend told him he had to visit a community clinic. Health workers there said that if he’d waited longer for treatment, he might have lost sight in that eye. He says he thinks it’s unlikely that officers didn’t know he was a journalist when they shot him. “I wasn’t running, I wasn’t chanting,” he said. “Protesters aren’t normally dressed in a dress shirt and slacks.” Goyette wasn’t the only journalist who was targeted by Minneapolis police that week. Many documented being pepper sprayed despite clearly identifying themselves as reporters. Others were arrested, gassed, threatened, or ⁠— like Goyette ⁠— shot with rubber bullets. In a clip that went viral, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television, despite the fact that he was accompanied by a full news crew with cameras and sound equipment. “I worry that the sort of ‘fake news’ doctrine is leading to journalists being targeted,” said Goyette. “And this is the first time that I think we saw that at a systematic scale.” On June 3rd, the ACLU filed suit against the City of Minneapolis over the attacks on journalists that were carried out by MPD officers. Goyette is the lead plaintiff in the case. “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but I feel angry, and a little bit afraid,” he said. “The Police Chief made an apology to journalists who were fired upon, but there wasn’t anything behind that apology. No promise to investigate and hold people accountable, nothing other than a sentimental gesture. And I fear that people are just going to move on.”

Published June 23, 2020 at 11:42PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3eu2a5Y

#IFTTT #Blogger

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dcmarticles · 4 years ago

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Common Types of Truck Collision Injuries

It seems like every day we hear about a trucking collision on the roadways we travel daily. All too often severe injuries result to those involved. Below, we have compiled a list of the most common injuries that drivers experience after being hit by a tractor-trailer.

Head and Brain Injuries

Head and brain injuries are some of the most common and most devastating injuries caused by collisions involving large trucks. Traumatic brain injuries, also known as TBIs, are caused by the impact of the inside of the skull on the brain and frequently coincide with lacerations to the scalp or face, blunt head trauma, and concussions. Small lesions on the brain are sometimes indistinguishable in CT scans and X-rays. Because of this, specific types of imaging, such as MRIs or high-resolution CT scans must be used to locate these lesions. Symptoms of TBI include difficulty concentrating, trouble sleeping, mood and/or memory problems, and headaches. Sometimes called the invisible injury due to the difficulty in showing TBIs using imaging, TBIs and head trauma injuries are extremely serious and can severely negatively impact one's life for years after a collision.

Back and Neck Injuries

The impact of a massive tractor-trailer colliding into a small passenger vehicle can be so powerful these collisions commonly end in fatalities. Those lucky enough to survive these collisions often suffer damage to the soft tissues in their back and neck, tendons, muscle strains, and ligament injuries. Bony structures in the spine, called vertebrae, protect the spinal cord. In between each vertebra are rigid cartilage cushions known as discs, allowing ease of motion and flexibility between the bones in the spinal column. Yet, when injured, these discs can, unfortunately, bulge, leave, or collapse (become fully herniated). Once this happens, the vertebrae's area narrows, and the nerve bundles become pinched, leading to severe and debilitating symptoms that can result in paralysis or worse. Back and neck injuries are some of the most common injuries suffered in any collision and they must be treated properly for injuries to recover.

Broken Bones

While some broken bones can heal without significant medical intervention, this is not the case for all broken bones. In severe cases, broken bones require surgeries that leave the patient in excruciating pain with pins, screws, and rods inserted into their bones. Broken bones can either be non-displaced (cracked but intact), displaced (entirely fractured and out of their regular position), or compound (bone puncturing through the skin and exposed). In these cases, the fractures may cause internal bleeding, nerve damage, permanent deformity, and infection if they are not immediately treated.

Lacerations

Various parts of a car or truck, including sharp metal, door frames, shattered glass, dash panels, and hard plastic interiors, can cause puncture wounds and deep lacerations on passengers. Unfortunately, many victims of trucking collisions must live with disfiguring scars even after their wounds heal. The head and face are the most common areas passengers suffer lacerations and puncture wounds because they are the most exposed part of the body. Even after a wound heals, many times a scar will serve as a lifetime reminder of the collision.

Burns

Sometimes the impact of a truck collision can cause fires or explosions. Because of this, some survivors suffer from severe burns and, sometimes, infection. Friction burns may also occur when a person scrapes against the inside of the car, or they are ejected and scrape the pavement. No matter the case, burn injuries are complicated to treat and sometimes require surgery. These burn injuries form distinct scars that survivors carry with them for life.

Spinal Injuries

One of the most severe common types of truck collision injury is a spinal cord injury. This injury occurs when the spinal cord is severed or damaged in any way. These types of injuries can lead to partial or total paralysis. Because the spine is the channel in which the brain communicates to the rest of the body, spinal injuries can sometimes result in survivors not being able to walk and even quadriplegia (the loss of function in all extremities). These patients will often require help eating, bathing, speaking, and breathing.

Wrongful Death

Unfortunately, many highway fatalities are the result of collisions involving large commercial trucks. While these cases are complex and can require court proceedings, it is important that we as a society hold responsible those who cause injuries to others. Doing so allows the surviving family members to cover for funeral expenses, medical costs, loss of income, and the general emotional pain they will endure from losing a loved one.

If you or a loved one have suffered any of these truck collision injuries, give us a call today.

Located in Seattle and Mercer Island, Washington, Gosanko & O'Halloran is a team of highly skilled attorneys available to help you today. Our legal team can answer any of your questions during a free legal consultation, and help you understand your options before you make a decision. To schedule a legal consultation today with one of our lawyers, call our law firm at 206-275-0700.

#Accident Lawyer #truck collision #attorney #lawyer #seattle attorney

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davidslepkow · 4 years ago

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3M MILITARY EARPLUG LAWSUIT LAWYER- TINNITUS‎ & HEARING LOSS

When a government contractor sells the government a product that does not work, they are usually subject to large penalties. When this product is one that is used by members of the military as military hearing protection, it can subject the company to additional liability. This liability manifests itself through the form of military hearing protection product liability lawsuits. 3M has recently settled a 3M Earplug lawsuit filed by the government that it made false claims in supplying the military with these military hearing protection combat earplugs. This claim was originally filed by a whistleblower on behalf of the U.S. Government.

Military earplug lawsuit

Now that the military earplug lawsuit settlement has been entered into, the first 3m Combatarms earplug lawsuits have been filed by former service members against the company for injuries suffered through use of the defective 3m earplugs. There are currently tens of thousands of defective earplug lawsuits pending in the Northern District of Florida.

142,000 MILITARY EARPLUG LAWSUITS FILED IN FEDERAL COURT

The Multidistrict litigation lawsuit is known as, “IN RE: 3M Combat Arms Earplug Products Liability Litigation.”

There are currently 142,527 lawsuits pending (as of Aug 17, 2020) before M. Casey Rodgers (Chief Judge, USDC) in MDL -2885.

WHAT ARE THE CRITERIA TO BE IN THE 3M EARPLUG LAWSUIT?

3M Aearo Technologies Earplugs / military hearing protection Criteria:

Claimant Served in the Military between 2003 and 2015 and used the 3M or Aearo Technologies “Dual-ended Combat ArmsEarplugs–Version 2”

Military ear plugs claimant suffered partial or full hearing loss and/or tinnitus (ringing of the ears)

COMBAT ARMS LAWSUIT UPDATES

Update- 7/27/2020- “3M Not Entitled to Governmental Immunity In Defending Lawsuit Over Combat Earplugs, Judge Says In the first substantive ruling to come out of the Multidistrict Litigation over allegedly defective earplugs, U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers refused to grant summary judgment based on 3M’s government contractor defense.” 3m failed to show “exceptional circumstances” in order to file an immediate appeal. 3M asserted that they were entitled to governmental immunity from civil lawsuits because they operated under a duty to the federal government. United States District Judge Casey Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida denied 3M’s bid to dismiss thousands of lawsuits filed in the MDL. Justice Rodgers determined that 3M’s arguments were effectively bogus by citing a US Supreme Court decision in 1988, Boyle v. United Technologies Corp. “Defendants have identified no authority — none — in which a defendant having no design obligation to the federal government nonetheless enjoyed the benefit of the government’s sovereign immunity pursuant to Boyle.”

5/7/2020- “Pensacola, FL- Recent unsealed depositions confirm that 3M officials knew their Combat Arms earplugs were defective and that information was withheld from the military. Further, some 3M employees didn’t believe that soldiers “needed to know how to adjust” their earplugs so they would fit properly. A federal judge in Pensacola on April 20 made hundreds of documents public. Besides depositions, these documents include emails, memos and receipts related to the Defense Department’s purchase of 3M’s earplugs between 2003 and 2015. In the depositions, Elliot Berger, division scientist for 3M’s Personal Safety Division, acknowledged an internal memo that said “ the existing product has problems unless the user instructions are revised,” reported Bloomberg Government, a division of Bloomberg Industry Group. As well, when Timothy McNamara, 3M’s sales manager for the U.S. Midwest was asked during his deposition whether soldiers were entitled to know that the way the company tested the earplugs wasn’t the same way that service members were instructed to use them, he answered “I don’t believe so.” Lawyers and Settlements

“Despite visiting military bases frequently, McNamara said that he never shared how to use the earplugs in order to achieve the advertised noise-reduction rating, reported Bloomberg. Plaintiffs argue that 3M knew from testing that the earplugs were too short to fit properly into an ear canal and could loosen in a way that was imperceptible to the wearer. 3M modified the design but the military was given information to show that the modification was for people with very large ear canals. Other testing results were conducted before the earplugs were shortened to fit into a carrying case, according to court documents.” Id.

4/24/2020- “U.S. combat troops were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with protective earplugs that they may not have known how to fit properly, and some employees of manufacturer 3M Co. didn’t believe soldiers needed to be told how to adjust the devices, according to unsealed depositions by company officials in a mass tort lawsuit. In the depositions, reviewed by Bloomberg Government, 3M officials couldn’t point to documents or calls in which U.S. military representatives were told that the earplugs can imperceptibly loosen. Yet internal memos acknowledged “the existing product has problems unless the user instructions are revised,” according to Elliot Berger, division scientist for 3M’s Personal Safety Division. In addition, Timothy McNamara, 3M’s sales manager for the U.S. Midwest, said he didn’t “believe so,” when asked during his deposition whether soldiers were entitled to know that the way the company tested the earplugs—and achieved a high noise reduction rating—was different than the way service members were instructed to use them. McNamara, who visited military bases on a regular basis, also acknowledged he never shared how to use the earplugs in order to achieve the advertised noise-reduction rating.” Bloomberg Government

4/2/2020- “3M Co has moved to dismiss thousands of lawsuits by service members and veterans alleging it sold defective earplugs to the military, saying their state-law claims were based on a design element mandated by the U.S. Army. 3M in a motion filed in federal court in Pensacola, Florida on Wednesday said the military approved precise specifications for the company, a contractor, to follow and took responsibility for training service members how to properly use the earplugs.” Reuters

5/29/19- “On May 22nd Judge M. Casey Rodgers issued Pretrial Order No. 7 naming the leadership for the plaintiffs in the 3M Combat Arms™ Earplugs MDL. Selection was made from among 190 applicants. Bryan Aylstock was named Lead Counsel, supported by Shelley Hutson and Chris Seeger as Co-Lead Counsel. Brian Barr and Michael Burns were named Co-Liaison Counsel. These five lawyers, along with Evan Buxner, Tom Cartmell, Mark Lanier, Roberto Martinez, Paul Pennock, Adam Wolfson and Genevieve Zimmerman will comprise the Executive Committee.”

WHAT ARE 3M COMBAT EARPLUGS?

3M’s combat earplugs were intended to prevent loud noises from entering soldiers’ ears and causing damage. Combat often subjects military forces to noises that are literally deafening. If the combat ear plugs do not work, soldiers can suffer permanent and debilitating hearing loss complications or tinnitus. The latter condition is when there is actual ringing in the ears or the sensation of ringing.

The combat earplugs that were supplied by 3M were dual ended earplugs. Either end of them can be inserted in the ear. There was a different type of protection depending on which end was inserted into the ear. These were supplied to all troops in combat from 2003 to 2015. This spanned wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The earplugs were initially made by Aearo Technologies, but 3M bought the company in 2008. Aearo and then 3M were the exclusive provider of 3M earplugs to the U.S. military.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT Northern District of Florida Mark Walker, Chief Judge Jessica J. Lyublanovits, Clerk of Court

IT ALL STARTED WITH 640 LAWSUITS CONSOLIDATED TO NORTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA

Many victims are wondering how the MDL in Federal Court commenced? In April 2019, there were 640 Military earplug lawsuits pending in Federal Court. In a little more than a year, the 3M lawsuits have ballooned to over 142,000 lawsuits filed(August 2020). “A federal judicial panel has sent more than 640 lawsuits to Florida that allege defective earplugs caused hearing problems in U.S. military service members. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation coordinated the lawsuits, brought against 3M, in an order on Wednesday, selecting U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers of the Northern District of Florida. Many of the plaintiffs attorneys had supported districts in Minnesota and Missouri, and 3M had supported Minnesota, home of its headquarters. Other lawyers had pushed for districts in California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. But the panel appeared influenced by the national scope of the lawsuits.” Law.com

JUDGE CASEY HAS RESOURCES AND EXPERTISE TO MANAGE THIS LITIGATION

“Centralization in this district allows the panel to assign this nationwide litigation to a forum with the necessary judicial resources and expertise to manage this litigation efficiently and in a manner convenient for the parties and witnesses,” wrote the panel’s chairwoman, Sarah Vance. “Judge M. Casey Rodgers, to whom we assign these proceedings, is an able jurist with experience in presiding over a large products liability MDL.” Id.

DEFECTS AFFECTING THE 3M COMBATARMS EARPLUGS

The issue with these earplugs is that they loosen in the ear. This not only reduces the level of protection, but it leaves the ear vulnerable to the loud noise that the earplugsare intended to block.

In other words, when the earplugs move out of place they simply do not work. This occurs because one end of the earplug presses against the wearer’s ear canal and folds back to its original shape.

The earplug only works when it can mold itself to the ear, and when it returns to its original shape after being inserted into the ear, it is malfunctioning. This is because it does not maintain the seal that it is supposed to give to protect against noise.

WHISTLEBLOWER 3M EARPLUG LAWSUIT

Historically, this all started when 3M was sued by a whistleblower related to the ear plug case on behalf of the United States Government. One of the remedies that can be applied when a company sells defective products to the federal government is a suit under something known as the False Claims Act. This statute is intended to punish those that defraud the government in any way. The real meat of the statute comes from the potential penalties. The government can recover up to three times the damages that it suffered. That punishment is intended to act as a deterrent to those that would attempt to defraud the government. Anyone can bring suit on behalf of the government in an action that is called a qui tam. The whistleblower, who is referred to as the relator, can receive a portion of the money that the government recovers.

3M LAWSUIT

Here, the ear plug case, otherwise known as the “3M lawsuit” claimed that the defects in these plugs were known to the manufacturer as far back as 2000, and were not disclosed. 3M was accused of certifying that these earplugs met the relevant testing standard when, in fact, they did not. 3M settled the False Claims Act lawsuit in July 2018. As part of the settlement, 3M paid the government $9.1 million to resolve the False Claims Act allegations. The company did not admit guilt as part of the settlement.This False claims act settlement is the beginning of the problems for 3M as hearing loss settlement amounts will need to be paid to tens of thousand of victims.

PRODUCT LIABILITY SUITS ABOUT MILITARY HEARING PROTECTION AGAINST 3M

Recently, veterans have begun to file lawsuits against 3M related to the combat ear plugs, claiming that they suffered permanent hearing loss as a result of the defective earplugs. Notwithstanding any settlement with the federal government, veterans and military personnel can still file suit against 3M. In fact, injured service members have to sue 3M as a result of the army ear plugs if they want compensation because the Feres Doctrine prevents them from filing suit against the United States.

PRODUCT LIABILITY THEORY

These army ear plugs lawsuits have proceeded under thep roduct liability theory , alleging that the earplugs were defective. If the plaintiffs can show that these earplugs were defective and caused their injury, then they can recover from 3M. The company had a duty to warn of the defects of their product and failed to do so.

COMBAT ARMS LAWSUITS HISTORY- EARLY 2019

At least 11 combat arms ear plug lawsuits were filed in January 2019. Several of the ear plug lawsuits were filed in Minnesota, where 3M is based. The soldiers who filed these combat arms suits alleged that they have suffered some degree of permanent hearing loss from the use of these earplugs. These lawsuits were simply just the beginning of what turned out to be a torrent of legal action that the company is now facing. Given the sheer number of soldiers who were sent into combat and were required to use these earplugs, it was now anticipated that 3M could eventually be facing over 200,000 lawsuits. (142,000 as of August 2020)

WHAT IS MULTIDISTRICT LITIGATION?

Multi-district litigation is not the same as a class action suits. Multi-district litigation merely consolidates cases together for purposes of discovery, settlement and pretrial issues as opposed to litigating the merits of all of the cases at one time. With multi-district litigation, there are several bellwether trials to determine the merits of the lawsuit and possibly the proper settlement value. Other military earplug lawsuit attorneys indicated an intent to possibly file a class-action lawsuit.

If you served in combat overseas after 2003 used military ear protection and have suffered any form of hearing loss or have any problems hearing, you should immediately contact a ear plug case lawyer to discuss your case. When you speak with the 3M earplug lawsuit lawyer, you can relay the facts of your case, and the lawyer can inform you of your legal options and the process whereby you can possibly recover for the damages that you have suffered. The consultation is free and the 3m earplug lawsuit lawyer is usually not paid unless you receive some sort of combat arms financial compensation as a result of your military earplug lawsuit.

Sources and more information about military hearing protection, the 3 M lawsuit and military earplug lawsuit (3m):

Complaints

Star Tribune

Justice.gov

#3m #military earplug lawsuit

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nancydhooper · 4 years ago

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“All Hell Broke Loose.”

Kishon McDonald, 39, originally of Cleveland, Ohio, poses for a portrait in his neighborhood in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

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Law enforcement officers clearing protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2020.

Derek Baker

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Gabe Schlough at his home in Denver, Colorado.

Jimena Peck for the ACLU

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Toni Sanders, 36, poses for a portrait at her home in Washington, D.C., June 13, 2020.

Allison Shelley for the ACLU

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David Ryder for the ACLU.

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Jared Goyette stands in front of the remains of the Minnesota Police Department’s Third Precinct.

Brandon Bell for the ACLU

Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

Listen to this episode

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/all-hell-broke-loose via http://www.rssmix.com/

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ladystylestores · 4 years ago

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Rayshard Brooks shooting: US policeman faces murder charge

Image copyright Reuters

Image caption Mr Rolfe conducted a sobriety test on Mr Brooks in the car park

A police officer who fatally shot a fleeing black man in the back last week in Atlanta, Georgia, will be charged with murder and assault, officials say.

Garrett Rolfe, who has already been fired, faces 11 charges related to Rayshard Brooks’ death. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

The other officer who was at the scene, Devin Brosnan, plans to testify as a witness in the case, officials said.

The case comes amid US protests over police killings of black Americans.

Lawmakers in Washington are currently debating new police reform laws.

Officer Brosnan – who has already been placed on administrative leave – will be charged with assault for standing on Mr Brooks’ shoulder as he lay dying.

Image copyright Police handout

Image caption Garrett Rolfe (left) and Officer Devin Brosnan

Officials said this was the ninth time that an Atlanta police officer had been prosecuted for homicide.

They added that it is believed to be the first time a police officer would testify against a member of his own unit.

Which US police reform plan might become law?

Seven solutions to US police problems

What happened?

Mr Brooks failed a field sobriety test on 12 June after he was found asleep inside his car that was blocking a drive-through lane at a Wendy’s restaurant.

After pulling over his vehicle, the father-of-four appeared “slightly impaired, but his behaviour during this incident was almost jovial”, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said on Wednesday.

For over 40 minutes, video shows him complying with officers as he consented to a weapons search and provided them with his identification details.

However, as officers tried to handcuff him, he began struggling. The footage appears to show Mr Brooks punched Mr Rolfe, grabbed Mr Brosnan’s stun gun and turned back while fleeing to fire it at Mr Rolfe.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionMr Brook’s family call for officers to serve time in jail

Mr Brooks suffered two gunshots to the back that caused organ injuries and blood loss. One police bullet also hit a witness’ vehicle, nearly killing the driver, investigators say.

The struggle that cost Rayshard Brooks his life

Prosecutors said Mr Rolfe said: “I got him.” For over two minutes after Mr Brooks was shot, neither officer provided medical attention as police are required to do, prosecutors said.

Instead, Mr Rolfe kicked Mr Brooks while he was on the ground, and Officer Brosnan stood on Mr Brooks’ shoulder immediately after the shooting, Mr Howard added.

What else did the prosecutor say?

The district attorney said that eight videos from the scene showed Mr Brooks “displayed no aggressive behaviour during the 41 minutes and 17 seconds” that he was questioned, and posed no physical risk to the officers in that time.

Mr Brooks was 18ft (5.5m) from the officers when he was shot twice in the back, investigators say.

“I believe that at the time of the shooting, Mr Brooks did not represent a threat,” Mr Howard said, noting that police rules prohibit firing a Taser at a fleeing suspect.

“So he certainly cannot fire a handgun at someone running away,” he said.

How have the suspects responded?

A lawyer for Mr Rolfe blamed Mr Brooks for his choice to “violently attack” the arresting officers “suddenly, without warning or provocation”.

“Mr Brooks violently attacked two officers and disarmed one of them,” continued the statement issued by the LoRusso Law Firm.

“When Mr Brooks turned and pointed an object at Officer Rolfe, any officer would have reasonably believed that he intended to disarm, disable, or seriously injure him.”

A lawyer for Mr Brosnan disputed the district attorney’s claim that he will serve as a “state’s witness”, or that he has already admitted to standing on Mr Brooks as he died.

“It’s absolutely untrue,” lawyer Don Samuel told the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper.

“The decision to initiate charges by the Fulton County DA’s office is irrational, unethical and obviously based on factors which should have nothing to do with the proper administration of justice,” he said in a statement. The newspaper added that the prosecutor faces re-election in August.

What has the reaction been?

The shooting came amid nationwide unrest over the death in police custody of another unarmed black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The four officers involved in Mr Floyd’s arrest have been sacked and are facing charges of second-degree murder, or aiding and abetting murder.

Image copyright EPA

Image caption Rayshard Brooks (undated photo)

The Wendy’s restaurant where Mr Brooks died was burned by arsonists after about 1,000 protesters turned up there in the hours after his death. His death also led to the resignation of Atlanta’s chief of police.

A lawyer for Mr Brooks’ widow, Tomika Miller, told the Associated Press that there were not aware of some of the details announced on Wednesday, such as Mr Rolfe’s alleged kick as Mr Brooks lay dying.

“It’s heartbreaking, but it’s an attempt to redefine justice,” said lawyer L Chris Stewart.

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Media captionThe Wendy’s drive-through restaurant was set on fire over Mr Brooks’ shooting

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denisehil0 · 5 years ago

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‘We’re sick of it’: Anger over police killings shatters US

MINNEAPOLIS — Another night of unrest in every corner of the country left charred and shattered landscapes in dozens of American cities Sunday as years of festering frustrations over the mistreatment of African Americans at the hands of police boiled over in expressions of rage met with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Cars and businesses were torched, the words “I can’t breathe” were spray-painted all over buildings, a fire in a trash bin burned near the gates of the White House, and thousands marched peacefully through city streets to protest the death of George Floyd, a black man who died Monday after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck until he stopped breathing.

His death is one of a litany of racial tragedies that have thrown the country into chaos amid the coronavirus pandemic that has left millions out of work and killed more than 100,000 people in the U.S., including disproportionate numbers of black people.

“We’re sick of it. The cops are out of control,” protester Olga Hall said in Washington D.C. “They’re wild. There’s just been too many dead boys.”

People set fire to police cars, threw bottles at police officers and busted windows of storefronts, carrying away TVs and other items even as some protesters urged them to stop. In Indianapolis, police were investigating multiple shootings, including one that left a person dead amid the protests — adding to deaths in Detroit and Minneapolis in recent days.

In Minneapolis, the city where the protests began, police, state troopers and National Guard members moved in soon after an 8 p.m. curfew took effect to break up protests, firing tear gas and rubber bullets to clear streets outside a police precinct and elsewhere.

At least 13 police officers were injured in Philadelphia when peaceful protests turned violent and at least four police vehicles were set on fire. In New York City, dangerous confrontations flared repeatedly as officers made arrests and cleared streets. A video showed two NYPD cruisers lurching into a crowd of demonstrators who were pushing a barricade against one of them and pelting it with objects. Several people were knocked to the ground, and it was unclear if anyone was hurt.

“The mistakes that are happening are not mistakes. They’re repeated violent terrorist offences and people need to stop killing black people,” Brooklyn protester Meryl Makielski said.

Few corners of America were untouched, from protesters setting fires inside Reno’s city hall, to police launching tear gas at rock-throwing demonstrators in Fargo, North Dakota. In Salt Lake City, demonstrators flipped a police car and lit it on fire. Police said six people were arrested and a police officer was injured after being struck in the head with a baseball bat.

Police have arrested at least 1,669 people in 22 cities since Thursday, according to a tally by The Associated Press. Nearly a third of those arrests came in Los Angeles, where the governor declared a state of emergency and ordered the National Guard to back up the city’s 10,000 police officers as dozens of fires burned across the city.

The damage in U.S. cities came as many Americans plan to return to in-person church services on Sunday for the first time in several weeks since the pandemic forced a ban on large gatherings. Pastors in pulpits across the country will likely be urging peace amid the rubble of riots.

Trump appeared to cheer on the tougher tactics Saturday night, commending the National Guard deployment in Minneapolis, declaring “No games!” and saying police in New York City “must be allowed to do their job!”

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the violence as he continued to express common cause with those demonstrating after Floyd’s death.

“The act of protesting should never be allowed to overshadow the reason we protest,” Biden said in a statement Saturday night.

Overnight curfews were imposed in more than a dozen major cities nationwide, including Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle.

This week’s unrest recalled the riots in Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King, a black motorist who had led them on a high-speed chase. The protests of Floyd’s killing have gripped many more cities, but the losses in Minneapolis have yet to approach the staggering totals Los Angeles saw during five days of rioting in 1992, when more than 60 people died, 2,000-plus were injured and thousands arrested, with property damage topping $1 billion.

But not all protests were marred by violence. In Juneau, Alaska, local police joined protesters at a rally in front of a giant whale sculpture on the city’s waterfront.

“We don’t tolerate excessive use of force,” Juneau Police Chief Ed Mercer told a gathering where most people wore masks and some sang Alaska Native songs.

The show of force in Minneapolis came after three days when police largely avoided engaging protesters, and after the state poured in more than 4,000 National Guard troops to Minneapolis and said the number would soon rise to nearly 11,000.

“The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd,” said Gov. Tim Walz, who also said local forces had been overmatched the previous day. “It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”

Some residents were glad to see the upheaval dissipating.

“l live here. I haven’t been able to sleep,” said Iman Muhammad, whose neighbourhood saw multiple fires set Friday night. Muhammad said she sympathized with peaceful protests over Floyd’s death but disagreed with the violence: “Wrong doesn’t answer wrong.”

___

Numerous AP journalists contributed from across the U.S.

Tim Sullivan And Stephen Groves, The Associated Press

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