Roger Johnson

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.

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.

Marcel Bonetti, 73, a chef who had cooked for Playboy Clubs, actor Kevin Costner, singer Tom Jones and former President Jimmy Carter, died in October 2016, days after an uncomplicated umbilical hernia repair. Two days after the operation he went to an emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and emergency physician Dr. Peter McCarthy diagnosed a common post-operative ileus without ordering blood work, a CT scan or a surgical consult. Bonetti kept getting worse until a CT scan two days later showed bowel ischemia; he was septic by the time he reached emergency surgery and died in intensive care that day. His family sued McCarthy and the emergency staffing company that employed him for wrongful death, and in October 2019 a St. Charles County jury awarded them $1,000,000.