New York Personal Injury News & NYC Legal Current Events

New York Worker Denied Compensation After Fall Injury

A man who is recently retired from the Coxsackie Correctional Facility in Catskill, New York, has been denied workers’ compensation benefits by an appellate court, which ruled that since the man voluntarily retired from his job he was therefore not eligible for post-retirement injury benefits.

The workers’ compensation court case involved corrections lieutenant Donald Balint, who was seriously injured at work when a chair he was sitting in collapsed. Balint continued to work for over a year, but then decided to retire from his job because of his worker injury. However, while the court agreed that Balint did indeed suffer a permanent and significant injury when he was injured at work, they also believed that his voluntary retirement from his job meant that he did not qualify for injury benefits.

Furthermore, the court found that they could not verify that his disability caused his retirement or that his disability caused him to take a lower-paying job four months after retirement.

Balint’s New York workers’ compensation attorney argued that the judge’s decision went against a very recent past decision involving a similar NY workers’ comp case. In that case, Rocio Zamora was injured at her place of work in 2003 when a computer monitor fell on top of her. After it was confirmed that she suffered a permanent partial disability from the work injury, and after she began receiving workers’ comp, she left her company in 2007.

When Zamora tried two new jobs, she discovered that her disability prevented her from successfully working. The appellate court found that woman’s former employer could not prove that Zamora’s search for a new job was inadequate, and that she should continue to receive injury benefits. 

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