$4 Million Wetzel County Verdict for Death After Missed Exploratory Surgery, Paid Out at $1.16 Million
After trial: Reduced and paid. The January 2008 verdict was $4,000,000; the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals applied the statutory cap to the noneconomic award and struck prejudgment interest.
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.
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