New York Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

A federal jury in Islip, New York, has ruled for Toyota in a case of sudden acceleration in New York. This is in Suffolk County and near Nassau County.

The jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding Toyota was not responsible for a doctor’s 2005 Scion sudden acceleration and collision into a tree, sources tell us. The jury found the driver to be at fault, instead.

It was all the driver, not the brake or the floor mat which may have caught the accelerator, a lawyer for the car company reported. The doctor “made a mistake in the operation of his 2005 Scion TC”, the lawyer said to the jury. “He made a simple but unfortunate mistake.”

The doctor’s lawyers maintained that either the car’s electronic throttle system malfunctioned or the pedal was caught in the floor mat in the 2005 Toyota TC. Toyota had a great number of displays and video to show the jury otherwise. It took less than an hour for the jury to finally decide.

“It was all about how the mat came into play and it obviously it didn’t,” a 38-year-old juror told the court. According to her, her decision was influenced by “all the testing Toyota did. They had it all on video. It pretty much explained it.”

The case was filed on July 23, 2008 and from there it took nearly three years to arrange the trial and finally come to a verdict, but after a great deal of testimony, it took very little time for the jury to decide, due to what they saw as overwhelming evidence for the safety of the vehicle in question. There was no personal injury involved.

There were last minute attempts to dismiss a juror by Toyota, with the plaintiff resisting, but the motion was denied. Even so, Toyota prevailed. The jury decided for the car company and the judge ruled the case dismissed with prejudice. In the end, it came down to the exhibits and evidence that Toyota was able to present, showing the safety of their cars and how much testing they do to make sure their vehicles are safe and not the caused of personal injury.

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It was reported in the news recently that the makers of Lean Cuisine issued a voluntary recall of its Spaghetti and Meatball product due to some pieces of red plastic having been found inside the packages, claims a New York Injury Lawyer. What is puzzling the folks at Nestlé, the parent company of Lean Cuisine, is that the pieces of red plastic seem to have come from an emergency stop button.
Sources tell reporters that the emergency stop button is located at various locations along a manufacturing line so that any worker who spots a problem along the line can stop it so that no further problems can occur until that particular problem is corrected. The process has been proven to work at manufacturing facilities throughout the world. What is puzzling about this case is that Nestle says that the way the plant was designed that no emergency stop button is located near those areas that food would be moving past.
As part of Nestlé’s ongoing investigation into how the plastic could have gotten into the product, they have gone so far as to contact their suppliers to see if any of the ingredient shipments could have contained the plastic, the New York City Injury Attorney was informed. Thanks to the implementation of modern technological manufacturing processes, the company has the ability to pinpoint the processed packages down to the minute they are produced. This allowed the company to know precisely which packages to issue the recall.
While the packages that have been affected have thus far been located by consumers in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, the following recall information should be repeated as a precaution in case any of this product has made it to any other location.
The company says to look for the bar code first which is PC 13800-10390, and then to look for production code that is located in the proof of purchase panel, which is 0298595519 P. Each of the recalled packages will have the same production code, and the company says that it must include the P at the end of the production code. That signifies the hour the product was made whether it is made in Nassau or Suffolk County.

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