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The wife of Morton Scheinbaum has sued Las Vegas Mountain View Hospital over the death of her ex-husband. Linda Scheinbaum claims nearly an hour had passed from the time her husband arrived at Mountain View Hospital while a nurse insisted on getting his Social Security number, emergency contact and insurance information.The Scheinbaums were told to take a seat and wait – even though a delay of just minutes can make the difference between life and death during a heart attack.

Dr. John MacGregor, a cardiology expert witness from San Francisco General Hospital, would say later that Scheinbaum should have been rushed immediately into the emergency room for treatment. And emergency room bystanders would testify to their shock that the hospital staff failed to take his condition seriously.

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DuPage County, IL, Judge Dorothy French ordered the Indian Prairie School District’s to hand over records they’re hoping will show hypocrisy in the school district’s objection to reimbursements the Brach and Brodie trusts are seeking over a failed land deal. The records include contracts, bills, invoices and payments for its attorneys and finance expert witnesses as well as documents regarding its legislative efforts to secure quick-take power. The Sun-Times News reports:

The district also is contesting the validity of all fees sought for reimbursement because attorneys and expert witnesses secured by the trusts used “block billing” rather than a “task-based billing” approach that would allow their charges to be scrutinized for “reasonableness.”

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Oral argument Tuesday at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals centered on a pharmacology expert witness who contends the acne drug Accutane causes inflammatory bowel disease. DailyReportOnline.com writes:

Three trials over an alleged link between the acne drug Accutane and serious gastrointestinal problems have resulted in verdicts of more than $20 million in New Jersey and Florida state courts. Hundreds of other such cases have been filed in New Jersey, and several of those are scheduled for trial this fall. But at oral argument Tuesday at the federal appeals court in Atlanta, it looked like plaintiffs proceeding in federal court may have a much harder time….

Arguing for the drug company defendants, Paul W. Schmidt of Covington & Burling in Washington argued that a key flaw in the expert’s approach was that he homed in on select evidence, making “leaps of faith based on these data points.”

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In Industry Standards, Technology Associates, the forensic engineering expert witness company discusses cases where there may be no significant amount of “good” custom and practice within an industry.

…where there is no good custom and practice within the industry, the need for dispassionate engineering judgment is even greater. Further, the engineer should be familiar with relevant techniques outside of the industry in question, so as to determine whether such techniques can be used to improve custom and practice within the subject industry. As a case in point, consider the application of a “dead-man” control to lawnmowers, for the purpose of automatically stopping the rotating blade when the operator takes his hands off the push-bar, for clearing a clump of grass which has become lodged in the structure of the lawnmower at a point dangerously near the blade. The dead-man concept, although long used in other types of machinery, has only recently received substantial (and badly needed) acceptance in lawnmowers.

In summary, in contrast to formal standards as defined above, an industry standard based on custom and practice may be relatively indefinite, requiring engineering analysis, judgment and explanation (especially in the area of human factors) in order to be used as a valid criterion for safe design and practice.

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Ray Everett-Church has been appointed Director of Privacy and Industry Relations at Responsys, a leading global provider of on-demand email and marketing automation solutions. Mr. Everett-Church, an internationally recognized author and expert witness on privacy and technology policy issues, has spent nine years at the forefront of industry efforts to increase trust and relevance in email and interactive marketing. The computer security expert is co-author of “Internet Privacy for Dummies” and “Fighting Spam for Dummies.” He serves as an expert witness on privacy and security matters and is a frequent commentator on privacy and technology policy issues.

Dan Springer, Chief Executive Officer of Responsys, has this to say on computer security: “The adoption and use of new trust and privacy enhancing technologies is one of the biggest issues facing the marketing industry today.”

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On August 15, attorneys for the Detroit City Council submitted a witness list to Governor Jennifer Granholm for the removal proceedings against Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. A supplemental witness list includes Wayne State Law School professor Peter Hammer who will serve as a contracts expert witness. WXYZ.com reports:

Most of the names on the list are attorneys who have been in the media since the text message scandal broke in January. Also on the list is attorney Valdemar Washington, who was the facilitator over the settlement agreement between the city and the Detroit police officers who sued because they say they were fired for working on investigations that may have revealed the alleged affair between Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff Christine Beatty…

The Council has asked Granholm to remove Kilpatrick from office for allegedly using public funds to secretly settle the officers’ lawsuit. The case settled for $8.4 million.

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The Texas Forensic Science Commission is investigating negligence and misconduct complaints against forensic labs and has agreed to look into allegations that Cameron Willingham was convicted and sentenced to die on fire officials’ faulty testimony. Willingham was executed four years ago for the 1991 murder of his 1-year-old twins and 2-year-old stepdaughter in a house fire.

A five-member panel of national fire experts, who conducted the analysis, found much of the trials’ expert testimony relied on outdated, invalid investigative criteria and called for improved training of fire investigators and prosecutors who handle such cases. Chron.com also reports:

“These two cases in Texas are just the tip of the iceberg,” Innocence Project co-director Barry Scheck said in an e-mail statement. “Across Texas and around the country, people are convicted of arson based on junk science that has been completely discredited for years.”

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Michael Stephen Gorbey, 38, was sentenced Friday to 22 years in prison in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia following his conviction on multiple weapons charges, including possession of explosives and the attempted manufacture or possession of a weapon of mass destruction near the U.S. Capitol in January 2008. The weapons expert witness who examined the homemade bomb in Gorbey’s car found what appeared to be a small hole in the can that could have been used to hold a fuse for the bomb. The expert witness testified that if detonated, the device could have caused death or serious bodily injury to multiple people.

Marketwatch.com reports:

This case marks the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia charged a person with attempting to manufacture or possess a weapon of mass destruction based upon the local District of Columbia statute that was passed in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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This week a jury found that a forklift manufacturer was not liable for a 1999 tip-over accident in which the operator was thrown from a forklift resulting in catastrophic injuries. The injured party lived seven years as a quadriplegic. Massachusetts U.S. District Court Judge Reginald C. Lindsay presided over the five-week trial in which the jury returned its unanimous verdict. The forklift manufacturer’s engineering expert witness successfully argued that the accident was caused by operator error, not a breach of warranty or any defect present in the forklift.

The defendant faced great exposure because the parties stipulated to more than $2 million in economic damages. The plaintiff also sought damages for pain and suffering, punitive damages under the Massachusetts Wrongful Death Statute and multiple damages under G.L.c. 93A.

For more see Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly.

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In Strategic Security Management: A Risk Assessment Guide for Decision Makers, author and security expert witness Karim H. Vellani provides a “definitive text on security best practices, introduces the concept of analysis for security decision making, and discusses advanced threat, vulnerability, and risk assessment techniques that you can apply to your organization’s security program.” The first two chapters include:

Chapter 1, Data Driven Security, sets the tone for the rest of the book with its discussion of a relatively new security concept, using data to drive the security program. Security professionals, only recently, have started using quantitative data to determine appropriate security levels. This chapter provides some of that food for thought mentioned above as well as a “howto” for developing security metrics.

Chapter 2, Asset Identification and Security Inventory, discusses the first two steps of the risk assessment process, the identification and categorization of organizational assets and the itemization of existing security measures. Critical assets, those that are integral to the organization’s mission, are the focal point of the first half of this chapter, while three types of security measures are discussed in the latter half. Also included in this chapter is a list of definitions so we’re all speaking the same language as we progress through the book.

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