$50 Million Verdict After a Cardiologist Sent a Patient Home the Night He Died
After trial: The verdict was returned in March 2026 and is too recent for any appeal to have been resolved. No appellate outcome has been reported.
Won by Cunningham Bounds, LLC.
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.
What happened
Dan Haas got home from a hunting trip in December 2020 feeling unwell. On Christmas Day he called his longtime cardiologist, Dr. John Galla, describing severe pain between his shoulder blades. Galla told him to come into the office three days later, on December 28, for evaluation.
Haas made it to that appointment. What his family's lawyers argued happened next was the failure at the center of the case: rather than admit him for observation and treatment of what they said was a life-threatening coronary blockage, Galla examined him and sent him home. Haas died that same night.
The family, Barbara, Sarah, Carrie, and Daniel Haas, sued Galla and his practice, Cardiology Associates of Mobile, in Mobile County Circuit Court. No hospital was named as a defendant. The case turned entirely on what Galla knew about Haas's heart, what the symptoms he described on the phone and in the office should have signaled, and whether a cardiologist familiar with his patient's history had enough information on December 28 to know that sending him home carried a real risk of death.
The family's lawyers, Lucy Tufts and Skip Finkbohner of Cunningham Bounds, argued that Galla was well acquainted with Haas's cardiac condition and had managed it with medication in the past, including clearing him for an elective eye surgery and prescribing blood thinners in its aftermath. That history, they told the jury, made the decision not to hospitalize him on December 28 harder to explain away as a reasonable judgment call rather than a missed diagnosis.
Cardiology experts testified for the family that if Haas had been admitted and started on routine blood thinning treatment that night, his odds of survival would have exceeded 99 percent. The defense disputed that Galla's care fell below the standard required of a treating cardiologist and argued the case for what a reasonable physician would have done with the information available at the time.
The trial ran 13 days before Judge Ben Brooks, unusually long for a single-defendant medical malpractice case, reflecting the volume of expert testimony on both sides about coronary disease, blockages, and what Haas's symptoms should have prompted. On March 12, 2026, the jury returned a verdict for the family: $50 million in wrongful death damages.
After the verdict, Finkbohner said plainly what the case had been about for the family. Haas should have been admitted to the hospital, he said, and if he had been, he would still be alive.
The case is recent enough that no appeal has been filed or reported as of this writing, and no appellate court has reviewed the verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Cunningham Bounds, LLC
All Cunningham Bounds, LLC proven verdicts →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.
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.