Margaret Utsey

A Mobile County jury awarded the family of Dan Haas $50 million after a 13-day trial, finding that cardiologist Dr. John Galla and his practice mismanaged Haas's cardiac symptoms and sent him home the night he died rather than admitting him to the hospital.

A Mobile County jury awarded the estate of John West Jr. $35 million in punitive damages after Springhill Memorial Hospital gave him two doses of the opioid Dilaudid following minor thumb surgery and failed to monitor him; the trial court reduced the award to $10 million, and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed it in 2023 as the largest wrongful death award the court has ever upheld.

Lew and Catharine Hudgens of Alabama were poisoned by carbon monoxide that seeped into their room from an adjacent boiler room during their honeymoon at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, and were not found for four days, after Catharine's sister twice asked lodge staff to check on them. Lew died and Catharine was left with permanent brain damage. A Gallatin County jury heard the case against Rainbow Ranch Holdings and related defendants over close to two weeks and returned a combined $15 million verdict on April 10, 2024, assigning 65 percent of the fault to the lodge and the rest to parties that had already settled confidentially, which leaves the lodge answerable for $9.75 million of it under Montana's apportionment statute. Local reporters described it as more than double the largest jury award previously recorded in the county. No appeal has been located.

On November 6, 1995, a Mack tractor-trailer hauling logs ran off a Clarke County, Alabama road and rolled over, jamming the passenger door and shifting the logs forward to block the driver's door. The rollover trapped driver Tonnie Ray Witherspoon inside the cab, where a small fire from the crash spread and engulfed the truck, killing him. His mother, Mary Witherspoon, sued Mack Trucks under Alabama's Extended Manufacturer's Liability Doctrine, and a Clarke County jury awarded $50 million in punitive damages, later remitted to $25 million. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed Mack's liability in 2003 but ordered a further remittitur to $6 million, which Witherspoon accepted.

In January 2006, Paulett Pettaway Hall, a 32-year-old wife and mother of two, went to Springhill Memorial Hospital in Mobile for exploratory surgery. Her records showed risk factors for pulmonary aspiration, but the anesthesia team used a routine induction instead of a rapid sequence induction, and she aspirated bile into her lungs and died of aspiration pneumonitis on January 16, 2006. A Mobile County jury returned a $20 million wrongful death verdict in December 2009, which the trial court remitted to $4 million and her estate accepted. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the $4 million judgment on September 28, 2012.