A $4 Million Wrongful-Death Verdict Was Paid Out at $1.16 Million. This Is the Case That Shows What West Virginia's Cap Actually Does.
After trial: Final. The January 2008 verdict was $4,000,000 compensatory. The WV Supreme Court of Appeals reversed the circuit court's refusal to apply the cap, reduced the noneconomic award to the statutory limit under W. Va. Code 55-7B-8, and struck prejudgment interest for want of ascertainable pecuniary loss. Dr. Murthy ultimately paid $1,162,741.60, confirmed by the later opinion at 237 W. Va. 490, 788 S.E.2d 18 (No. 15-0376, 2016). Because the death was in 2001 the applicable cap was the pre-2003 $1,000,000 figure rather than today's $250,000 and $500,000 regime. Note also that a verdict-reporter digest circulates a figure of $2,837,259 for this case; that appears to be an intermediate circuit-court judgment number and is not what stood. The 2016 opinion concerns the estate's follow-on bad-faith claim against Murthy's carrier and no figure from that track is included here.
Won by Bordas & Bordas, PLLC.
A woman came to the Wetzel County Hospital emergency room in 2001 and came under the care of a surgeon who, the estate proved, failed to perform the exploratory surgery that would have found and corrected her intra-abdominal condition. She went into shock and died the next day. The jury awarded $4 million. She was paid $1,162,741.60.
What happened
In 2001 a woman presented to the emergency room at Wetzel County Hospital in New Martinsville, West Virginia, and came under the care of the surgeon Dr. Anandhi Murthy.
The estate's case was specific: Murthy failed to perform the exploratory surgery that would have identified, diagnosed and corrected her intra-abdominal condition. She went into shock and died the following day.
After a four-day trial in January 2008 a Wetzel County jury returned $4,000,000 in compensatory damages, structured as $1,000,000 to each of three wrongful-death beneficiaries plus $1,000,000 for the decedent's own pain and suffering. That split is the ordinary statutory distribution of one family's recovery and not a pooled multi-plaintiff award.
Then the cap arrived.
West Virginia limits noneconomic damages in medical professional liability cases under W. Va. Code 55-7B-8. The circuit court declined to apply it. The Supreme Court of Appeals reversed that refusal, cut the noneconomic award down to the statutory ceiling, and struck the prejudgment interest as well, because there was no ascertainable pecuniary loss to carry it.
Dr. Murthy ultimately paid $1,162,741.60, the reduced judgment plus interest.
This is the case to read if you want to know what the West Virginia cap does rather than what it says. A jury valued a woman's death and her family's loss at $4 million, and $1.16 million changed hands. And because the death occurred in 2001, the applicable ceiling was the pre-2003 figure of $1,000,000. The regime that replaced it is lower, so the same case tried on today's law would be cut harder.
The estate was represented by Christopher J. Regan and Geoffrey C. Brown of Bordas and Bordas.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Murthy v. Karpacs-Brown, WV Supreme Court of Appeals: the opinion, giving the Wetzel County venue, the single decedent with three statutory beneficiaries, the failure to perform exploratory surgery and the death the following day, the four-day January 2008 trial and the $4,000,000 verdict, the reversal of the circuit court's refusal to reduce, the application of the W. Va. Code 55-7B-8 cap, the striking of prejudgment interest, and the counsel block naming Regan and Brown of Bordas and Bordas for the appellee
- 2.Karpacs-Brown v. Murthy, 237 W. Va. 490, 788 S.E.2d 18 (2016), No. 15-0376: the follow-on opinion confirming that Murthy ultimately paid $1,162,741.60, the reduced judgment plus interest
More proven verdicts from Bordas & Bordas, PLLC
All Bordas & Bordas, PLLC proven verdicts →Lewis Timmons, 61, was transferring hydrogen from his tanker into the storage system at the Muskingum River power plant when the storage area exploded and killed him. The enclosure had a defective roof and undersized copper relief stacks that could not vent a release, and an earlier hydrogen explosion at an AEP facility had already produced safety recommendations the company never acted on.
Johna Ankrom, 52, was shopping with her granddaughter when Wal-Mart employees detained a shoplifter in the vestibule's main traffic aisle. He broke away, collided with her cart and pulled it down on top of her. She suffered traumatic intestinal injuries, went through multiple surgeries, and now lives with a permanent ileostomy.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.