Michael Zerres

Jack D'Avila, a concrete laborer on a scrap-metal shredder installation in Jersey City, was struck on the head by an unsecured 20-foot extension ladder on May 18, 2005, fractured his cervical spine, and two days later suffered an anoxic brain injury when his ICU surgeon did not intubate him before he went into respiratory distress. He spent three years on a ventilator and died in July 2008. After a four-month trial in Middlesex County, a jury found the site owner Hugo Neu, the installer Femco Machine Company, and trauma surgeon Patricia Schrader liable and awarded his estate, widow, and two children $7,346,363, entered as an $8.54 million judgment with interest. The Appellate Division affirmed the verdict and judgment in a published 2015 opinion, remanding only indemnification questions among the defendants.

Joseph DeHanes, a 38-year-old Westinghouse machine operator with a wife and two young children, went to the Raritan Bay Medical Center emergency room in 1992 with a tear in the inner lining of his aorta. Emergency physician Michael Rothman did not diagnose it, the aorta ruptured and bled into the sac around his heart while he was still in the emergency room, and he died. A jury found that with proper care he had a 70 percent chance of survival and awarded his family $2,025,000. Dr. Rothman appealed over the plaintiff lawyer's summation, and the Appellate Division and then a unanimous New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed in April 1999, overruling the old rule that kept juries from hearing an aggregate figure for future lost earnings.