Declarations

“There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours. I’m fully cooperating with the police investigation.”

— Actor Alec Baldwin took to Twitter to express his sorrow after he fatally shot a cinematographer on a New Mexico film set with a gun a crew member had assured the actor was safe, a tragic mistake that came hours after some workers walked off the job to protest conditions and production issues.

“Property owners have been through a lot. We also hear cries from the neighbors, people who are living or working across the street or next door to some of these properties. We can’t allow these things to exist forever in the city.”

— Lake Charles, Louisiana Mayor Nic Hunter told the city council that 300 to 400 commercial buildings damaged last year by Hurricane Laura are being condemned or marked for demolition. Demolishing every commercial building condemned because of the storm could cost more than $15 million, Hunter said. The city council has imposed a $1,000 daily fine for unsecured commercial properties in certain instances.

“It is difficult to prove bias based policing cases because quite often what you need to prove is that the officer was biased, that he had some thoughts that he was biased, that he’s a racist.”

— Gary Steed, former executive director of the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers Standard and Training, on the difficulty of proving police bias following an Associated Press examination that showed allegations of bias against Kansas law enforcement rarely leads to sanctions. The AP reviewed more than 700 bias complaints filed by members of the public to local and state law enforcement agencies and university campus police since 2011 and found that most complaints were too vaguely worded to determine whether the complaint alleged racial bias or another type of bias.

“Inadequate coverage is a particularly concerning prospect in the construction industry, where workers put their bodies on the line.”

— Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a press release issued by his office announcing along with New York City Department of Investigation (DOI) Commissioner Margaret Garnett the indictment of Dragonetti Brothers Landscaping, Nursery, & Florist (DBLNF) and D.B. Demolition Inc., as well as their respective presidents Nicholas Dragonetti and Vito Dragonetti for evading more than $1 million in insurance premiums while working on City of New York contracts for sidewalk and road repair. The defendants are charged in a New York State Supreme Court indictment with various counts of insurance fraud, offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree and penalties for fraudulent practices under New York state’s Workers’ Compensation Law.

“Until now, we have not had a full sense of how hard meatpacking workers were hit.”

— U.S. Representative James Clyburn, chairman of the subcommittee, said in his opening statement at a U.S. House subcommittee hearing on the pandemic’s impact on meatpacking workers. The meatpacking industry was especially hard hit by COVID-19 in part because its workers tend to be in close proximity for long hours in often messy conditions. Workers at the leading U.S. meatpacking plants experienced cases and death from COVID-19 that were up to three times previous estimates, according to a new report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

“Once is, in fact, enough.”

— That’s what a Georgia appeals court said in late October, after a woman tried to have it both ways. After a serious vehicle accident, she settled with the drunken driver’s insurer for $100,000, then tried to claim another $100,000 from her own carrier, Allstate, on her uninsured motorist policy. The woman went so far as to designate that the drunken driver’s settlement was mostly for punitive damages. But the court found that the uninsured motorist policy was a traditional, not excess, policy, so it did not provide payment over and above what the other driver’s policy paid. “The mere fact that Nay’s limited release included a statement allocating a portion of her $100,000 recovery to punitive damages did not then shift the payment of those punitive damages to Allstate as her UM (uninsured motorist) carrier,” the appeals court’s Fifth Division said in Allstate vs. Laura Cochran Nay.