Linda Bollea has reached a settlement in the civil suit filed on behalf of John Graziano, according to her attorney. Graziano suffered severe brain injuries while riding in a car driven by Bolea's son in August 2007 when Nick crashed into a tree while speeding. Nick Bollea served 166 days of an 8-month sentence after pleading no contest to a charge of reckless driving involving serious bodily injury. He was released in October 2009.

Linda Bollea's confidential settlement was reached six months after her divorce from her husband Terry, better known as Hulk Hogan. Hogan and his son Nick were also named in the lawsuit. There's no word on where the rest of the case stands.

We're sorry to rain on the parade of the ten contract workers who won a $100 million verdict against energy company BP in a Galveston federal district court on Friday, but the chances of that verdict surviving intact are pretty slim. That's because all but $300,000 of that amount represents punitive damages. If you compute the ratio of punitive to actual damages, you get 333 to 1, which is not a ratio that many courts will look favorably on. In addition, Texas caps punitive damages in most cases at $200,000 per plaintiff.

Still, that verdict should get the attention of BP, which faces similar claims by an additional 133 workers. All claim to have been injured by a toxic chemical release at BP's troubled Texas City oil refinery in 2007. Click here for an account of the verdict by the Houston Chronicle.

We talked on Monday to plaintiffs lawyer Anthony Buzbee of Galveston's Buzbee Law Firm, who represents the 10 workers who won the verdict, as well as the other 133. "The whole purpose of the case was to punish BP," said Buzbee. "I was very upfront [with the jury] that this was a punitive damages case." He admits that his clients' injuries were minor: All were released from the hospital the same day they were admitted. But, he contended, BP has a history of safety violations at this plant that it refuses to remedy. The Texas City refinery is the same facility where 15 workers were killed in a 2005 explosion, leading the company to pay $2 billion in private damages and a $50 million criminal fine (see third item). Federal and state regulators, he contended, are unwilling or unable to force the company to improve the safety of its working conditions. (The company is fighting an $87 million fine imposed this year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.)

Read more at
http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/digestTAL.jsp?id=1202437108572&BPs__Million_Personal_Injury_Verdict_Nearly_All_Punitives

DART bus driver hits pedestrian last Monday in downtown Des Moines sending the suffering walker to Iowa Methodist Medical Center for treatment of her injuries. This marks the seventh such bus pedestrian accident in two years involving DART prompting Iowa officials to enact two new rules.

The new rules include a temporary turn-and-honk policy, and a complete ban on left hand turns in the heart of Iowa’s capital city. All of this occurred less than a week after personal injury lawyers, representing DART and an injured pedestrian, reached a $2.74 million settlement agreement involving the plaintiff being struck by a city bus. The mulit-million dollar bus accident injury claim involved one of the other 7 pedestrians who have been hit by DART buses since July 2007.

Read more at
http://www.justicenewsflash.com/2009/08/04/dart-bus-driver-strikes-pedestrian-number-7-forcing-rules_200908041807.html

Scott Skirpan, a 50-year-old ex-Marine from Easton, lost both his legs three years ago in a gruesome industrial workplace injury accident in Pennsylvania at a Northampton County landfill. According to this article in The Philadelphia Daily News, the firm that owns the landfill, and Caterpillar Inc. (which made the bulldozer that crushed his legs), agreed to pay Skirpan $16.25 million to settle his negligence lawsuit in mid-trial. It is one of the largest settlements in Pennsylvania history for a single-victim personal-injury case.

On May 1, 2006, five days into his job as a truck spotter at the Chrin Sanitary Landfill, a massive track loader backed around a pile of garbage and ran him over.
Skirpan’s attorney argued that Chrin Brothers, which owns the landfill, had failed to train their client, and that the Caterpillar didn’t have adequate rear vision. Skirpan was airlifted to St. Luke’s Hospital Trauma Center, arriving in cardiac arrest. He had eleven operations. Ultimately, surgeons had to remove his right leg and part of his right hip, and most of his left leg.

Read more at
http://www.pennsylvaniapersonalinjuryblog.com/2009/07/worker_wins_16m_settlement.html