Illinois Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

Should Children Under 13 Be Using Smartphones?

June 20, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Tom Farnum, an anesthesiologist from Colorado, wants his state to pass a law forbidding retailers from selling a smartphone that is intended for use by anyone under 13 years old. He is the spearhead of a statewide petition drive aimed at accomplishing that objective.

Why?

Because Farnum has witnessed the effect that he believes smartphones had on his own children, and is concerned about the results of various studies on the same topic. In summary, the concerns are that smartphones and similar technology:

How Seniors Get Scammed

June 19, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The National Council on Aging has published its “Top Ten Financial Scams Targeting Seniors” list. https://www.ncoa.org/economic-security/money-management/scams-security/top-10-scams-targeting-seniors/. These scams are crimes, and they are on the rise. When they happen, they are devastating to not only the senior victims, but also to those who care for them or must shoulder the financial burden when the scam has left the senior less able to.

If you are caring for a loved one in his/her senior years, please send them this link, and talk to them about these despicable, but popular scams:

(1) Medicare/health insurance scams: The perpetrator poses as a health care representative; the whole purpose is to get the senior’s personal information, which can then be used to submit false bills to Medicare and other insurers.

Manslaughter…..or Voluntary Act……or Free Speech?

June 17, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter today for texting messages to her emotionally disturbed boyfriend, Conrad Roy, convincing him to commit suicide. The facts of the case are very disturbing. Carter knew that Roy had been trying to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning…..sitting in his pickup truck as exhaust fumes filled the inside. When Carter learned that Roy had backed out of the suicide attempt, she repeatedly texted him with increasingly harsh messages, seemingly ridiculing him for not following through with the suicide. “You just have to do it,” she texted Roy. “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it!”

Roy then killed himself by getting back in the exhaust-filled truck.

Carter listened as Roy suffocated to death; failed to alert authorities; and did not tell Roy’s parents, even after she knew that Roy was dead. Roy’s body was discovered in his truck the next day; Carter had nothing to do with the discovery.

How TCE and PCE Can Harm Us: Expert Information You Can Trust

June 17, 2017 | Shawn Collins

If you have reason to research how chemicals can harm your family-say, for example, your water supply has been found to be contaminated-please be careful. There is a lot of “information” available on the internet, but not all of it is reliable. In the unreliable category are studies performed or funded by the companies who manufacture those chemicals, or use them in their industrial processes. They have hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars to gain by convincing us that their chemicals are safe. And while this extraordinary financial stake does not necessarily make their research false, common sense tells us that it may well cause them to resolve the scientific grey areas in favor of the conclusion that chemicals are safe, or not as dangerous as perhaps they truly are. That alone should cause you to look elsewhere for information to which you can trust your family’s health.

Who should you trust?

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for one. NRDC is a non-profit organization of scientists, lawyers, and other professionals who approach health and environmental issues from the people’s point of view. They take no money from polluters and others who might want to minimize environmental dangers to human beings. They advocate for those things that protect people, and insist that all doubts about, say, whether a chemical is dangerous, be resolved in favor of protecting human life and health, unless and until the doubts can be conclusively resolved to prove such protection unnecessary.

Clean Water Isn’t a Right if You Never Had It

June 16, 2017 | Shawn Collins

I’ve been working for nearly 18 years helping families in American neighborhoods use our court system to force the companies that polluted their water to clean it up. Despite all the anguish that having contaminated water initially caused these families, and despite the truly reprehensible behavior of some of the polluters who caused the contamination, I’ve always known one source of hope and pride: the American belief that everyone in this country has the right to clean water. We back up this belief with a host of laws–like the federal Clean Water Act–and regulations that compel our government agencies and courts to honor the right to clean water, even if it means forcing a polluter to spend millions of dollars to restore clean water to a neighborhood.

Now, it’s certainly a fair criticism–I’ve voiced it regularly–that our “clean water” laws could be stronger, enforced more vigilantly, or applied more thoughtfully, to help the disadvantaged in our communities. But the very fact that we have these laws at all, available for enforcement by courts who take them seriously in the great majority of cases in which I have been involved or of which I am aware, separates us from most countries in the world.

We Americans are often stunned to learn that the access to clean water which most of us take for granted is not shared by many in the rest of the world. As reported by an extraordinary organization called “Charity: Water”, there are more than 663 million people in the world who live daily without access to clean water.

Who are the Environmental and Health Agencies in Your State?

June 16, 2017 | Shawn Collins

There are many potential reasons why you might want to contact your state’s most important environmental and health agencies. Usually it is because you are concerned about an environmental issue in your area. Here are 10 questions you may want answered:

(1) Is there an environmental investigation being conducted in my area into possible groundwater or air contamination?

(2) Has a local plant, factory, or landfill been cited for violating environmental laws or regulations?

What To Do if Someone Wants to Test Your Property for Vapor Intrusion

June 14, 2017 | Shawn Collins

The threat that chemicals contaminating groundwater are turning into a gas (‘vaporizing”) and drifting upward to intrude into the breathing space of overlying homes exists in many neighborhoods throughout the country. And this threat will remain with us for decades, as we continue to try to deal with nearly a century of the environmental recklessness of companies that spilled, poured, buried and dumped toxic chemicals because it was cheaper to get rid of them that way.

That is why the residents of these neighborhoods are being approached by polluters and government officials who want the homeowners’ permission to come onto their property, and test to see if vapor contamination is present.

If you are approached for this permission, here’s what you should know/do:

Why it Was Necessary to File Criminal Charges in Flint Water Crisis

June 14, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Michigan’s Attorney General has criminally charged more than 50 people over the deplorable government behavior that stripped the families of Flint of their clean water from Lake Huron, and substituted dangerous, lead-contaminated water from the Flint River.

And now the Attorney General has just filed the most significant charges of all: he has charged the State’s Director of Health and Human Services (HHS) with felony manslaughter, and the State’s Chief Medical Executive with obstruction of justice. The HHS Director, when informed that the contaminated water might have led to an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that ultimately took the life of an 85-year-old man, is shockingly alleged to have observed that, “everyone has to die of something”. And the Chief Medical Executive is alleged to have threatened to withhold funding from a community health organization if it did not stop searching for the source of the Legionnaire’s outbreak.

While criminal charges are obviously serious, and in all honesty very rare in environmental contamination cases, they are certainly warranted here, in my opinion, for these reasons:

Congratulations to McHenry County, IL, for Disclosing its Groundwater Contamination Problems

June 13, 2017 | Shawn Collins

I want to take a moment to recognize McHenry County, IL, and its Public Health Administrator, Michael Hill, for disclosing on the County’s website what it calls “Groundwater Contamination Incidents”. http://ow.ly/Gb7v30cyNOF

McHenry, while a fast-developing county, is not far removed from its roots as essentially a rural community, where most residents drew their water directly from the ground, and so contaminated groundwater was a very big deal, indeed. It still is.

As you can see, McHenry and Hill have itemized 11 such “Incidents”, and interested citizens can click onto any one of them, and see a host of relevant documents, including environmental test results, newspaper articles, government correspondence, etc., as to each one of them. (I’m trusting that the County has identified all of the “Incidents” that it should, and that it adds new documents to each “Incident” page as they become available.)

Your Right to Know about Environmental Problems in Your Neighborhood: Using the Freedom of Information Act

June 13, 2017 | Shawn Collins

Government Often Keeps Us in the Dark

Is your government protecting you? If your air or water is contaminated, and your government knows it, it’ll tell you, right?

Sadly, the answer to these questions is often, “no”.