Jury Finds Delivery Maneuvers, Not Labor, Caused Newborn's Arm Injury
After trial: The jury's full noneconomic award stood because the 2014 birth predates Missouri's 2015 malpractice damages cap. No appeal has been identified.
Won by Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci.
A Greene County jury found that Dr. Chandria Johnson's delivery maneuvers, rather than the natural forces of labor, caused a brachial plexus nerve injury to a newborn boy identified as K.L. during his November 2014 birth at a Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities facility. Despite six corrective surgeries, the boy was left with permanent weakness in his arm. The jury returned a verdict of $2,348,338.60 against Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities and Dr. Johnson, and because the injury predated Missouri's 2015 noneconomic damages cap statute, the noneconomic award was not subject to a cap.
What happened
During a birth at a Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities facility in November 2014, the newborn boy became lodged against his mother's pubic bone as his shoulder failed to clear during delivery. Dr. Chandria Johnson, the attending physician, performed maneuvers to free him. In the process, the nerves running from his neck into his right arm, the brachial plexus, were damaged.
The family, suing on the child's behalf under the initials K.L., argued in Greene County Circuit Court that the injury came from how Dr. Johnson pulled and repositioned the baby during delivery, not from the ordinary forces of a difficult labor. Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities and Dr. Johnson denied liability, maintaining that the providers had followed the applicable standard of care and that the nerve damage resulted from maternal forces of labor beyond anyone's control.
The boy underwent six corrective surgeries in the years that followed, attempting to restore function to the arm. None fully succeeded. He was left with a permanently weakened arm and lasting impairment in its use.
Case number 1731-CC00487 went to trial before Judge Dan Wichmer. Roger Johnson and Scott Vorhees of Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci represented the family; Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities and Dr. Johnson were defended by Brian Malkmus and Jared Robertson of the Malkmus Law Firm. On October 31, 2023, the jury sided with the family, finding that the delivery maneuvers, not natural labor forces, caused the injury.
The jury's award totaled $2,348,338.60: $1.2 million for future medical costs, $500,000 in past noneconomic damages, $500,000 in future noneconomic damages, and $148,338.60 in past economic damages. The court separately taxed $9,205.95 in costs against the defendants.
Missouri reinstated a statutory cap on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases in 2015, and the state bars retrospective application of such a cap to claims that arose before it took effect. Because the birth was in 2014, the jury's combined $1 million noneconomic award was not subject to the cap. No post-trial reduction has been reported. 'We appreciated an attentive jury who was clearly determined from the outset to make the right decision and to find the truth,' Roger Johnson said after the verdict. No appeal has been reported in the case.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci
All Johnson, Vorhees & Martucci proven verdicts →A Greene County jury awarded $34,107,628 to a boy who suffered permanent brain damage during his 2014 birth at Cox South hospital in Springfield, where escalating doses of the labor drug Pitocin deprived him of oxygen. It was the largest medical malpractice verdict in Missouri in 2021, and because the injury predated the state's 2015 damages cap statute, the noneconomic award stood without reduction.
Kara Hansen was a 16-year-old Riverton, Kansas high school student when Corbin Hamilton rear-ended her 1966 Ford Mustang in Cherokee County on April 9, 2014, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the chest down. After a five-day trial in Cherokee County District Court, a jury found Hamilton fully at fault and awarded Hansen $38.5 million, including $18 million for future medical and life-care costs and $18 million in noneconomic damages. Kansas's statutory cap on noneconomic damages, which applied to claims arising before July 1, 2014 and was not struck down until more than a year after this trial, held that portion of the award to $250,000, putting the judgment that could be entered at roughly $20.75 million. Hamilton carried only a small liability insurance policy, leaving full recovery in doubt.
Mary Hunt sued Dr. Larry Clark and Freeman Health System after forceps used during her son's 2016 delivery caused bleeding deep in his brain and a stroke that damaged the left hemisphere. A Jasper County jury found both defendants negligent after an eight-day trial in Joplin and returned $7,688,861.10 on September 17, 2019. Before the verdict came in, both sides had agreed to settle within a range keyed to whatever number the jury chose, so the amount the family actually received stayed confidential.
A Greene County jury found three doctors and Lester E. Cox Medical Centers liable after a mother who reported reduced fetal movement was sent home without fetal monitoring, and her son was born with severe brain damage and cerebral palsy. The jury awarded $1.45 million in non-economic damages and about $3.37 million in future medical expenses. The trial court cut the non-economic award to the statutory cap, but the Missouri Supreme Court struck the cap in 2012 and the full verdict stood.
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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.