Tag Archives: settlement

Woman Wins $300k Due to Personal Trainer’s Negligence

Seems legit

When you purchase the services of a personal trainer, you hold an expectation that they have an idea or two about what’s good for your health and that their supervision over unfamiliar workouts comes with a certain expectation of safety. A New York woman found out the hard way that this is not actually true. The woman was exercising with her personal trainer, presumably pumping mad iron, when the trainer advised her to try out a new exercise using strange equipment or on a machine of some sort (the press release from which I found this story is a bit lacking in specific detail). She was hesitant at first because she had never done the exercise before, but continued anyway after the reassurance of her trainer.

NJ School District to Pay $4.2 Million to Student Paralyzed by a Bully

Protect our students

Sawyer Rosenstein was twelve years old when a bully punched him in his stomach hard enough to cause a blood clot in the artery that supplies blood to his spine. Two days later, the injury paralyzed him from the waist down, permanently, in a series of events declared “incredibly rare”. There is a certain heart-tugging sympathy we feel for the boy, because everyone has experienced a bully either as a victim or an agent or a powerless onlooker, and because in our experience bullying is merely “something kids just do”, and because this time it was more than that. Imagine being confined to a wheelchair for the better part of your entire life all because of the baseless anger of a violent child. Imagine no consequences to said child’s actions (the bully in this case, who was known to be one and had a history of violence, received only a few days’ suspension) and having to look him in the eye daily from your new wheelchair you’ll never leave. Try to imagine — and this is the difficult part — whether a $4.8 million check would make that prison any better.

Memphis to Clean Itself Up

Welcome to Memphis

In what might be the government equivalent to a friendly “take a shower, bro” at the gym, the city of Memphis, Tennessee has agreed to spend $250 million over a decade to fix and update its sewer system as part of a settlement. Apparently, the occasional overflow of untreated sewage was becoming a big problem in Memphis. Gross. The federal government, in particular the EPA, undertook litigation to force Memphis to fix these problems. On Monday, Memphis settled, paying a $1.29 million civil penalty (half of which will go right back to unrelated Memphis-bettering infrastructure projects) and agreeing that raw sewage is disgusting and probably shouldn’t be spewing out willy-nilly from time to time.

As to what extent these $250 million improvements will go is unclear. At least part of it will be to develop a “comprehensive fats, oil, and grease program”, which makes you wonder why there wasn’t one in the first place. This article shows images of a person actually kayaking through backed-up foamy white sewage sludge byproduct. In light of that repulsive fact, maybe the best course of action would be to have the TVA come in and toss a dam in there to fix everything up.

Foreclosure Settlement Finally Official

It’s gone. It’s done. I can see the Shire.

The US District Court judge for the District of Columbia signed off, finally, on the big $25 billion foreclosure settlement between five banks, the federal government, and most of the states. On Wednesday, Judge Rosemary Collyer approved the settlement, which was announced two months ago. The $25 billion settlement will be divvied up by the states and is suggested to be used to ease financial burden on improperly foreclosed homes and help pursue negligence in the future. However, as I’ve mentioned before, some states are going to use it for whatever they feel like. Georgia in particular is using the money to support local infrastructure, presumably telling the federal government “you can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my real dad”, slamming its door and hiding under the covers afterwards.

Read more after the jump.

Divorce Is Final, Says Court

Love hurts

The New York Court of Appeals ruled today that a Bernie Madoff victim can’t redefine the terms of his divorce on account of his losses to Madoff’s fraud. Steven Simkin and Laura Blank, when married, invested $5.4 million in Madoff’s business together. The terms of their 2006 divorce settlement totalling $13.5 million split all assets evenly. However, while Mr. Simkin elected to retain his stake in Madoff’s business in the divorce, Blank took her half in cash. Madoff turned himself in to police for perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme in history just two years later. Meaning that Simkin lost his millions, while Blank was none the worse.

Simkin sued Blank to essentially redo the divorce settlement, which eventually reached New York’s highest court. His argument was that, since Madoff’s investment was fraudulent, he and Blank should split the losses evenly. Today, the court decided against it, citing the finality of divorce and warning that allowing the resettlement would set a dangerous precedent for divorce settlements and other contracts. While Simkin tried to argue that the Madoff account didn’t exist and so he shouldn’t be held accountable for his investment in it, the Court disagreed, saying that the account did exist, it was just illegal, and that Simkin could have taken out his money at any time, like his ex-wife did. In other words, they called him a sore loser.