$6.6 Million Verdict With $4.4 Million Punitive After Nursing Home Ignored Warnings of Short Staffing
After trial: No post-trial appellate decision has been reported since the verdict. Payment is not public.
Won by Reddick Law, PLLC.
Lillie Whitney, 77, lived at Ouachita Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Camden from January 2015 until her death in August 2016. Certified nursing assistants testified that chronic short staffing made adequate care physically impossible, and that the operators had been warned repeatedly by staff, by residents and by the State and did nothing.
What happened
Lillie Whitney lived at Ouachita Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Camden, Arkansas, operated by Camden Progressive Eldercare Services, Inc., from January 2015 until she died in August 2016 at the age of 77.
Her daughter Sheila Whitney sued in 2017 as personal representative of the estate and on behalf of the wrongful-death beneficiaries, alleging negligence, medical malpractice, breach of the admission and provider agreements, and violations of the Arkansas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
What the jury punished was not a single lapse. Certified nursing assistants testified at trial about chronic short staffing that made it physically impossible to give residents the care they needed. And the operators had been told: by their own staff, by residents, and by the State. Repeatedly. They did nothing about it.
The procedural history is the Arkansas nursing-home pattern in miniature, and it is worth stating. The case was filed in 2017 and not tried until 2025. Roughly three of those years went to an interlocutory appeal on charitable immunity, because Camden Progressive Eldercare Services is an Arkansas nonprofit with 501(c)(3) status and an IRS public-charity designation. In 2022 the Court of Appeals actually reversed the denial of summary judgment and told the circuit court to grant immunity if reasonable people could not differ on the undisputed facts. The case survived that on remand and finally reached a jury.
After a seven-day trial in Camden before Judge David F. Guthrie, the jury returned its verdict on Tuesday, February 4, 2025: $2,200,000 in compensatory damages and $4,400,000 in punitive damages, for $6,600,000. The punitive award is twice the compensatory, which is what a jury does when it decides the conduct was not a mistake.
The estate was represented by Brian D. Reddick, Matthew D. Swindle and Heather G. Zachary, then of Reddick Moss and now practising as Reddick Law. The facility was defended by Kutak Rock.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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