$10 Million Settlement After a Hospital Morphine Overdose Caused Permanent Brain Damage to an Infant
Won by Cannon & Dunphy S.C..
A physician's morphine overdose left an 8-month-old boy at a La Crosse County, Wisconsin hospital with permanent brain damage, and the family's medical-malpractice claim resolved in a $10 million settlement handled by Cannon & Dunphy.
What happened
An 8-month-old boy was being treated at a hospital in La Crosse County, Wisconsin, when a physician prescribed an overdose of morphine. Morphine is a strong opioid, and the safe dose for an infant is very small. Dosing is calculated by weight, which leaves little room for error in a child that young. The amount this baby received was far more than his body could handle.
The drug depressed his system, and the result was severe brain damage. The injury was permanent. A baby who should have recovered and gone home healthy was instead left with a lifelong impairment, caused by a medication that was meant to control pain. The harm fell on the child and on the parents who would care for him for the rest of his life.
His family brought a medical-malpractice claim and hired Cannon & Dunphy, the firm William Cannon and Patrick Dunphy started in Milwaukee in 1985. To win, the family had to prove two things. First, that ordering and giving that much morphine to an 8-month-old fell below the standard of care a careful provider would follow. Second, that the morphine, and not some other condition, was what caused the brain damage.
Causation is often the hardest part of an infant medical case. Children are fragile and their medical histories are complicated, so a defense can argue that an injury came from something other than the drug. Building the proof takes detailed records, medical experts, and a clear timeline connecting the overdose to the harm.
The case resolved in a $10 million settlement. Because the parties agreed to settle, there was no jury verdict and no appeal, so no court later cut the figure. For a Wisconsin medical case, a recovery of that size was rare at the time.
William Cannon, who died of cancer in 2023, was remembered as one of the most successful trial lawyers in the state. Over a career that began in 1972, he was credited with winning more verdicts and settlements of $10 million or more than any other lawyer in Wisconsin history. The morphine case was one of them.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Cannon & Dunphy S.C.
All Cannon & Dunphy S.C. proven verdicts →A Walworth County jury found Waukesha Memorial Hospital liable after a nurse pushed air into a two-week-old premature infant's IV line during a blood transfusion, sending emboli to his brain and leaving him with permanent quadriplegia and no usable speech.
A Milwaukee jury verdict and a related settlement delivered $25.24 million to a family after an unlicensed first-year resident spent 11 hours treating their teenage daughter for constipation while a twisted bowel killed the tissue it fed.
An Ozaukee County jury awarded the estate of Judith Cisewski $15 million after a retaining wall at her Port Washington senior living campus collapsed and buried her under concrete blocks for roughly two hours; she died the following day.
The family of a three-year-old girl who died of E. coli traced to contaminated beef at a South Milwaukee Sizzler reached a $13.5 million settlement, among the largest food-borne-illness recoveries in the country.
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.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.