Indiana Injury Attorney on Crib Safety

John P. Young is your Indiana Injury Attorney.  Mr. Young has been in practice more than 22 years, practicing with the Indianapolis, Indiana law firm of Young and Young.  Young and Young has been in the business of assisting injured Hoosiers since 1954.  We help injured Hoosiers all over the state.  We specialize in serious injury cases only, such as wrongful death, spinal cord injury resulting in quadriplegia and paraplegia, burns, blindness, broken bones, amputation and brain injury.  Given that the risk of death of babies is a huge concern for us, we would like to pass on information about cribs that is of immediate importance to parents.  It is a maxim of safety engineering that any product defects which can reasonably be reduced or eliminated must be reduced or eliminated.  If they can reasonably be eliminated it is not enough to simply reduce the risk. The risk must be eliminated.  Reasonable means from an engineering and cost prospective.  Therefore if there is an effective engineering solution at a reasonable cost is available it must be used to reduce or eliminate unreasonable risks of harm or death to the consuming public.  A very simple example of this is toys with lead paint.  Paint without lead is available and cheap.  There is no excuse, therefore to use leaded paint on toys. Those manufacturers that use leaded paint on toys (China) must be forced to fix the harm their toys cause to children.  They must not have any incentive to use leaded paint in their toys.

More than two million baby cribs have recently been recalled.  The cribs pose a risk of serious injury or death to infants by suffocation or brain injury.  The defect is in the sliding door which can fall open and creating the risk of a baby having their head caught causing brain injury or death.  The paper states that at least seven children have died as a result of the crib’s design.  The recalled cribs were manufactured by the following manufacturers: Delta, Child Craft, Jardine Enterprises, LaJobi, Million Dollar Baby, and Simmons Juvenile products.  If you need more information you can visit the website for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  If you have such a crib, stop using it immediately and contact the manufacturer immediately for further instructions.   This recall brings the total recall of cribs at 9,000,000 since 2005.

We applaud the Consumer Product Safety Commission for its vigilance.  We know some will say this is just another example of unwarranted governmental intrusion into the lives of Americans.  Anyone who says this has never encountered the pain and hopelessness of the loss of a child.  Even one unnecessary death is too many.  Everyone with empathy for their fellow human beings understands this truth.