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Kentucky's Legal Headlines for February 2003
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| Kentucky
Trial Court Review - January 2003 - 7
KTCR 1 |
- Lottery Loses Litigation Over Lost
Job
Louisville lawyers, Keith Hunter and
Laurence Zielke score big in an
employment retaliation and defamation
case when husband and wife were lottery
employees alleging they were fired
in retaliation for supporting a
discrimination claim filed by a fellow
lottery employee who was blind.
Kim and Bob Hill were married and worked
for the lottery for 10 years. Kim was
willing testify favorably for a fellow
employee who claim he was fired because
of a disability (blind). Kim claims the
lottery bosses put pressure on her;
she withstood the pressure and
testified. Both she and her
husband were later discharged for
reasons relating to credit card misuse.
Kim and Bob sued claiming the credit
card claim was a pretext. Jury agreed
with her and awarded Kim and Bob
$1,697,866 and $2,654,450 respectively.
KTCR waxed eloquent and noted the
bizarre twist of the case in which the
lawsuit really was a lottery and not
just the get-rich-scheme allegation
oft-times raised by the defense bar.
On a bizarre twist, the blind employee
lost his disability discrimination claim
(also represented by Hunter). The
lotto folks accommodated the blind
employee with a voice-activated system
and a large contrast monitor for his
computer.
Moral of the story is - win some, lose
some; or rolls your dices and takes your
chances. Applies equally to the
plaintiff's lawyers (Hunter) and the
defense lawyers (Jan West).
- Zero Pain and Suffering Verdict in
Aggravation of Prior Disc Injury
Mildred Hess, age 82, was hit by
Mary Swan on Preston Hwy. Minor
damage to the car and defendant
stipulated fault. Defendant
claimed prior disc and minor damage.
Dr. Harkess testified per IME that the
plaintiff's problems were related to her
advanced age and not the MVA.
Plaintiff passed the $1,000 threshhold
instruction and was awarded all of her
medicals but nothing for pain and
suffering.
Until then, business as usual.
However, things got curiouser during
post-trial. Trying to get past the
Miller v. Swift problem, the plaintiff's
lawyer raised (1) Mildred was old but
she didn't need a cane until she was
hit; (2) her doctor found a new injury
on top of the disc; (3) (and this is the
new one) the defense attorney conceded
pain and suffering in his closing
argument. The defense response?
The plaintiff had prior conditions (just
as in Swift) and besides closing
arguments are not evidence.
Two jury questions of note. (1) Howza
bout some classical music instead of
that white noise when y'all go up to the
bench? (2) Any insurance to pay
those medicals?
KTCR commentary noted Justice Graves'
dissent in Swift - a 'bulls eye' on the
old and infirm who can be too old to
have any pain and suffering in the hands
of a wrongdoer.
Well, yes and no. Prior existing
conditions can exist in all and
degenerative problems can occur in folks
half Ms. Hess' age. Don't forget
the minor impact, too. Prior to
Miller v. Swift, Justice William Cooper
(in his days as a Hardin Circuit Court
trial judge) would use an instruction
indicating that if the jury awarded the
plaintiff any medicals, then they must
award them something for pain and
suffering. This instruction made
perfect sense prior to Miller v. Swift,
but now I don't think so since the jury
can award nothing if you can assert
pre-existing complaints and no
aggravation; the medicals were mostly
diagnostic rather than treatment; or a
superceding or external cause of the
problems; the plaintiff is a malingerer
or worse yet, a liar.
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| Slamming
Spam |
- I don't know about
you, but I get a lot of spam; over 1/2 my
emails are spam. Therefore, here are some
sites and tips on how to minimize your spam.
- TechTV Article has
useful tips - http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3147.html
- Short-hand tips:
- Keep your email address as
anonymous or on a need to know basis as best you
can. I have my posted at my web site.
Bad move. Why? There are little itty
bitty spiders that crawl around the web and
harvest email addresses. Now mine is out
there. What I should have done is use an
email box for inquiries off the web and change
it once it gets to being used too much.
When you are requested to give an email address
on some sites, use a free email address at
hotmail.com or some other site and let them send
all the junk to that one and not your business
address.
- Use a spam program. I use
CloudMark's SpamNet. It's free, and I can
set it up so all the spam goes into the
'deleted' folder organized by sender so they are
sequentially in order by name of sender making
it easier to ignore chunks of junk email.
- www.CloudMark.com
- Another good one I tried
is: http://www.mailfrontier.com/
- Free to try. $29.95 to by.
- Use the junk/adult filters in your outlook
program; sending the stuff to 'delete' (I
send mine to delete so I don't have to move
it twice).
- Set up some other filters for other stuff
you know you are getting. I figure
spamnet gets 35-40 per cent of my spam; and
my filters get the other 15 per cent.
I then set up some exceptions to make sure
certain senders make it through the maze.
- Some other items of interest in this area are:
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| Encrypting
Your E-mail |
- www.ZipLip.com
- Want to be able to send someone an encrypted email
without going to the bother of the complicated stuff?
Go to ZipLip and open a free web based account. You
can buy a bigger account or have pop access or even have
pop access with your own domain name - but at a fee.
- How does it work?
- Register for an account. Yourname@ZipLip.com
or whatever.
- It then works like HotMail and other web based
email. When you want to send an encrypted email,
you go to ziplip.com, sign in under services (user
name and password), then compose your email (or copy
the text into the body of it), type in the receiver's
email address, and make sure you send it secured.
- You will then be prompted for a password and a clue.
You can give the password to the recipient over the
phone etc or pick something easy like their first name
etc (failure to coordinate and leave them guessing may
cause delays>>>).
- It's then sent to them. If the recipient types
in the password, they see the email.
- Note - you can send attachements AND the recipient
does not need ziplip account to read the email.
- Cool. Use it for sensitive and personal stuff
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