$5 Million Verdict After Family Ended Life Support on a Wrong Terminal Prognosis
After trial: Final as modified. The jury awarded $5,000,000; the district court reduced the survival award to $450,000, and on February 15, 2024 the Utah Supreme Court reversed that award entirely for lack of evidence of pain and suffering (2024 UT 5).
Won by Christensen & Jensen, P.C..
Lillian Birt was in the ICU with respiratory failure, septic shock and reduced heart function. Her children agreed to discontinue life support because they understood from her doctors that her condition was terminal and treatment was only prolonging her death. It was not terminal, and there was a high likelihood she would have recovered. She died about eight hours later.
What happened
Lillian Birt developed complications after surgery, was diagnosed with pneumonia and sepsis, and was placed on life support. She was admitted to the intensive care unit under Dr. Wei Peng with respiratory failure, septic shock and decreased heart function. Staff ran weaning trials to see whether she could come off the ventilator.
Her children then agreed to discontinue life support. They did so because, from what the treating doctors told them, they understood their mother's condition to be terminal and the treatment to be unnaturally prolonging her death.
Her condition was not terminal. There was a high likelihood she would have recovered if treatment had continued.
She died about eight hours after care was withdrawn. The jury found the doctors negligent in connection with the withdrawal of care.
The damages are where this case becomes the clearest illustration available of how Utah's cap actually works, because the same jury award was half untouchable and half not.
The jury awarded $2,000,000 in noneconomic damages to each of Birt's two children for their own loss, which is a wrongful-death claim. Under Smith v. United States, 2017 UT 43, Utah's medical malpractice cap in Utah Code 78B-3-410 is unconstitutional as applied to wrongful-death claims, so that $4,000,000 could not be capped and it stood.
The jury separately awarded $1,000,000 for what Birt herself experienced, which is a survival claim, and survival claims are still subject to the cap. The district court cut that to the statutory limit of $450,000 and entered judgment there.
On February 15, 2024 the Utah Supreme Court went further and vacated the survival award altogether, holding there was no evidence Birt experienced pain, suffering or inconvenience in the eight hours between the malpractice and her death. The doctors did not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence behind the $4,000,000 to her children, and that figure is what stands.
Jenafer Birt Meeks, suing individually and on behalf of her mother's heirs and estate, was represented by Karra J. Porter and Anna P. Christiansen of Christensen and Jensen.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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