Federal Judiciary

JUDGES V. PLAINTIFFS
By Mark Thompson
markthomp@yahoo.com
Posted 05-07-08

The Appellate Division rescued plaintiffs in a pair of cases from trial court rulings that, in the appellate panels’ view, unfairly hamstrung the personal injury lawsuits.

In one of the cases, an appellate panel tossed out a verdict for the city in a suit brought by an injured employee because Kings County Justice Joseph Levine allowed the city to ambush the plaintiff with a late-disclosed witness. The plaintiff, Frank Caccioppoli, claimed that he injured his knee in a traffic accident involving his sanitation truck, but the jurors didn’t buy it -- not after having hearing from the surprise witness, a radiologist, who insisted that MRI films showed a degenerative condition in Caccioppoli’s knee.

That was a new theory, the appellate panel noted, and given the way it was sprung on him, Caccioppoli never had time to prepare a rebuttal. Adding insult to injury, the city didn’t bother to offer an excuse for waiting until the last minute to disclose the witness, which is all the more reason why Levine shouldn’t have let the city get away with it, the appellate panel said. Caccioppoli v City of New York (April 29)
 

Full post as published by Judicial Reports on May 07, 2008 (boomark / email).