Legal Daily News Feature
SaferProducts.gov Faces First Legal Challenge, and it’s About Time By Rebecca E. Neely As the late, former President Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
10/21/11
stopping the collection of complaints to be published in the database for months or years.
That quote seems fitting, in regards to SaferProducts.gov, an entity billing itself as the Publicly Available Consumer Product Safety Information Database website of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Rolled out in March and managed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the database that provides a vehicle for alleged consumer advocates to lodge complaints that can be publicly viewed about anything injurious as relates to commonplace products ranging from high chairs to power tools, is being legally challenged for the first time. According to the October 18 businessweek.com article, “CPSC’s public database faces first legal challenge”, “Company Doe” has filed a motion on October 17th in federal district court in Maryland to stop the Consumer Product Safety Commission from making public a product complaint. According to the filing, “there is no factual, scientific or medical evidence to support the complaint, which involves an injury to a child.” th
The motion calls for a judge to grant anonymity to the company for, according to the article, “all pleadings, documents and forms related to what it calls “baseless allegations.”” Why? Because making the company’s name known, as well as the complaint in court proceedings would basically result in the same publicity as putting it in the database, per the court papers. If the case went forward under seal, more challenges by other manufacturers could follow. This could result in essentially
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According to the article, CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said the commission would file a motion to unseal the court documents. He was quoted as saying: “So far, there are more than 3,300 incident reports that the public has open access to view in the database. Many of these incident reports involve serious cases of deaths and injuries.” Also per the article, the court papers state complaint against Company Doe was filed, surprisingly or not, by an unnamed governmental agency, versus the child’s family. Gibson Dunn attorney Baruch Fellner, who is just one of a team representing the company, declined to comment. A ‘report of harm’ can be filed by anyone with the SaferProducts.gov database. Oddly enough, those filing said reports aren’t required, per the article, “to have firsthand knowledge of the alleged injury or potential defect that could lead to injury.” Manufacturers named in the complaints are given fifteen days to respond before the complaint is made public, via the database. Per information at the organization’s website, the purpose of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is to protect the public from “unreasonable risks of injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products under the agency’s jurisdiction.” While the CPSC’s work has no doubt contributed greatly to the decrease of death and injury associated with consumer products over the past three decades, perhaps the CPSC should reconsider what appears to be a willy-nilly, witch hunt approach to this so called practice of reporting harm: it appears the majority of harm may be being done to manufacturers of said products.
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