Harford County Jury Awards $13.3 Million After Hospital Staff Ignored Fetal Distress Signals for 17 Hours
Won by Gilman & Bedigian.
A Harford County jury returned a $13.3 million verdict against Upper Chesapeake Medical Center and its attending obstetrician after nursing staff failed to recognize fetal distress signals during a 17-hour induced labor, leaving a boy born in 2004 with permanent brain damage and intellectual disability.
What happened
On July 26, 2004, Kenyetta Lewis arrived at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air, Maryland, to have labor induced. She had elevated blood pressure before admission, but hospital staff proceeded to administer Pitocin to stimulate contractions. Over the next 17 hours her hypertension persisted and the fetal heart monitor produced readings that her attorneys would later argue plainly signaled distress. No cesarean section was ordered.
When delivery finally occurred, the infant suffered an intracranial hemorrhage. The bleed caused permanent brain damage and intellectual disability. He grew up with cognitive impairments that will require lifelong care.
Lawyers H. Briggs Bedigian, Jon Stefanuca, and E. Merritt Lentz of Gilman and Bedigian, LLC tried the case over two weeks in Harford County Circuit Court. Their theory rested on two overlapping failures. First, Dr. Arthur Morey, the attending obstetrician, was negligent and did not obtain informed consent from Lewis about the risks of continuing labor given her condition. Second, nursing staff independently failed to properly administer Pitocin and failed to act on the fetal monitoring data that showed deteriorating conditions. A timely C-section, the plaintiffs argued, would have prevented the hemorrhage.
The jury agreed on both counts. On July 27, 2022, it awarded $13.3 million: $10.5 million for future medical care and expenses, $2 million for pain and suffering (subject to reduction under Maryland's statutory cap on non-economic damages), and the remainder for lost earning capacity. The University of Maryland Medical System, which owns Upper Chesapeake, said after the verdict that it was assessing its appeal options.
Upper Chesapeake Medical Center did appeal. In an unreported opinion reported by the Maryland Daily Record on April 30, 2026, the Appellate Court of Maryland reversed and remanded the case for a new hearing on the hospital's motion for a mistrial. The court found that the trial court erred by allowing the case to proceed without timely disclosing the terms of a Mary Carter Agreement, a pretrial settlement arrangement between certain defendants, and that the nondisclosure prejudiced the remaining defendant's ability to mount an effective defense. If the trial court grants a mistrial on remand, a new trial would follow; the $13.3 million verdict does not stand as a final judgment while that question is unresolved.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Gilman & Bedigian
All Gilman & Bedigian proven verdicts →A Philadelphia jury returned a $182.7 million verdict, later reaching $207.6 million with interest and upheld through the Pennsylvania Superior Court in July 2025, against the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for a 45-minute delay in performing a C-section on a mother with a known uterine infection, leaving her child with permanent cerebral palsy.
A Philadelphia jury awarded $108.6 million to a boy who suffered permanent brain damage during a December 2018 forceps delivery at Einstein Medical Center, in a case tried by Gilman & Bedigian against Jefferson Health. Jefferson has vowed to appeal, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is already reviewing the same liability doctrines in the firm's earlier $183 million Penn Medicine verdict, so the award is far from final.
A Baltimore City jury awarded $55 million after Johns Hopkins Hospital delayed an emergency cesarean section for more than two hours following a home-birth transfer, leaving infant Enzo Martinez with permanent cerebral palsy and profound neurological injuries.
A Baltimore County jury found that University of Maryland St. Joseph Medical Center performed an unjustified emergency cesarean section on a mother showing no confirmed signs of labor, delivering her son at 23 weeks and causing severe brain damage that will require lifelong care.
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.