Jackson County General Law Blog

When your marriage is not going well, you may consider divorce. In some situations, though, divorce is not the right answer. Missouri offers you an alternative. According to the Missouri Courts, you can file for a legal separation. This allows you to have a formal decision on your relationship without the permanent effects of a divorce.

A separation allows you to have the chance to eventually reconcile. People often choose this option if they are unsure about divorcing or if they want to stay legally married for some other reason. Some people may have religious objections to divorce or want to stay married for tax purposes. The key to this process is that you and your spouse retain all the legal rights of marriage, but you now live separately.

Do you know that studies show that, in motor vehicle collisions in Missouri and other states, as many as two out of every three vehicle operators were driving distracted just before they crashed? That basically means you are at risk for a distracted driving accident every time you get behind the wheel or travel as a passenger in someone's car, or even as a pedestrian.  

If you have a teenager in your household, he or she belongs to one of the most high-risk categories of people who are likely to die in distracted driving accidents. In fact, a distracted driving collision is the number one cause of death for people of this age group. You can be as proactive as possible to try to improve your own safety on the road. If you suffer an injury in a collision a distracted driver caused, you can seek legal accountability against him or her.  

If your loved one has just been through an auto accident or experienced a Missouri workplace injury, pay attention to how your relative reacts to outside conversation, follows outside stimuli, or how long it takes for your loved one to conduct ordinary household activities. Should your loved one experience problems with these activities, it is possible your relative may have suffered cognitive damage.

Brainline explains that cognition is an action that involves thinking and knowing. When a person engages in cognitive activity, that individual is perceiving information, comprehending it, storing it in memory, and using that information either in the present or for a later time. Cognition also involves communicating to other people, paying attention, organizing information, controlling one’s behavior, and exercising temperance.

You may be surprised to find out that not all sexual predators behind bars are guilty of committing a crime. In fact, there are a number of people who have been released from prison after spending years, sometimes decades, behind bars for a rape or sexual crime they did not commit. How does this horrible tragedy occur on such a regular basis? Errors in eyewitness lineups, as well as the inaccuracy of the human memory under times of severe stress can often lead victims to identify an innocent person as their attacker.

According to the Innocence Project, eyewitness misidentification was involved in 70 percent of the cases that were overturned after further evidence showed the person was innocent of the crime. There are several factors that may prompt a person to mistakenly identify the wrong person from a lineup. People are more likely to make a mistake if the perpetrator is a different race than their own. Studies show that people are unable to distinguish key facial characteristics in different races. This is especially true under times of high stress. The human brain may fail to pick up crucial pieces of information while it is struggling to deal with the stressful situation. The deficits in information may be filled in with false beliefs and invalid reoccurrences of what happened. People also have trouble remember exact details when there is a weapon involved.