Blaming the Guy on the Motorcycle, but….

By Dallas Personal Injury Attorney on June 4, 2012

We recently took a deposition in a motorcycle injury case where our client suffered a badly broken leg. A deposition, just like a trial, is when a witness testifies under oath and is required to tell the truth. And just like at trial, witnesses often lie. Since this defendant’s testimony was shockingly inconsistent with the facts, I have not been able to stop wondering if the defendant lied, or had somebody suggest to it a false excuse, or really just remembered the facts all wrong, or what.

We began the deposition believing that the defendant entered the intersection with the intent of shooting all the way across six lanes of traffic with a median in the middle in one reckless motion, and that this plan caused the defendant to be too busy looking at the traffic on the far side of the median to notice that there was a motorcycle approaching in the center lane on the near side of the median.

We were prepared to argue that any safe driver would first worry about getting safely to the median (as the law required), and only then worry about the next three lanes.

The defendant began by confessing that, yes, as we suspected, the intent was to cross all six lanes at once without stopping at the median. In fact, the defendant claimed, doing so was necessary because the median was so narrow that there was no way to wait at the median without sticking-out into traffic.

And if somebody just looks at diagram the police officer created for the police report, the defendant’s story actually seems reasonable enough. Indeed the median is drawn to be just one lane wide, with only a pencil-thin curb to guide those wanting to turn.

But, though the excuse was supported by the diagram, it was proved false by reality.

I believe that every Dallas personal injury lawyer should spend a good long while at the location of every accident. For motorcycle injury cases, the need for this is even greater. It was when we first invested a couple of hours at the intersection that we realized the intent of shooting all the way across. Once we understood that, we then realized that the diagram on the police report was flawed. The median was not only one lane wide. It was three lanes wide! So we took photos of how comfortably vehicles much larger than the defendant’s fit safely at the median. When the defendant told her “truth,” we were ready with photos showing the actual truth.