Iowa Nursing Home Family Verdict Cut to $800,000 After Punitive Award Set Aside
After trial: The district court eliminated the $1.37 million punitive award by judgment notwithstanding the verdict, leaving $800,000 in compensatory damages, and the Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed on June 16, 2021. The compensatory award was not challenged.
Won by RSH Legal.
Seven adult children of an 84-year-old resident of Mill Valley Care Center in Jackson County, Iowa, sued after she fell from the toilet in January 2016 and died five days later of head injuries. A jury found the home negligent in December 2019 and awarded $800,000 in compensatory damages plus $1.37 million in punitive damages. The trial court set aside the punitive award, and the Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2021, so the $800,000 compensatory award stood.
What happened
Jeanette Konrardy came to Mill Valley Care Center in Jackson County, Iowa, on August 11, 2012, when she was 80. She was at risk of falling throughout her stay, and a stroke in July 2013 raised that risk. She also had progressive dementia and a history of falls at the facility.
Her care plan called for staff to help her on and off the toilet but did not require anyone to stay with her while she was on it. A nursing assistant testified that she often took Ms. Konrardy to the toilet in the morning and left her there while she went into the adjoining room to put away her slipper socks. On January 19, 2016, Ms. Konrardy, then 84, fell from the toilet while alone in the bathroom and struck her head. She suffered a traumatic brain injury along with fractures of the vertebrae and face. She died on January 24, and the death certificate listed blunt force trauma as the immediate cause.
Her estate and her children filed suit on May 11, 2017, against Riverview Development Corporation, which does business as Mill Valley Care Center, and against Healthcare of Iowa, Inc., a company that had a consulting agreement to help the home stay compliant with Medicare regulations. Pressley Henningsen and Benjamin Long of RSH Legal represented the family. Healthcare of Iowa won summary judgment because the record showed it did not own the facility or supervise its nurses.
The case against Mill Valley went to a jury in Jackson County in December 2019 and took a little over a week. The family argued the home knew Ms. Konrardy was a fall risk and left her unattended anyway. The jury found Mill Valley negligent and awarded $800,000 in compensatory damages to the family, along with $1.37 million in punitive damages, for a total of $2.17 million.
After the trial, the district court granted Mill Valley's motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict on punitive damages. It found the evidence showed negligence but not the willful and wanton conduct Iowa law requires for a punitive award, and it rescinded that portion. The compensatory award was not challenged.
The family appealed the punitive ruling, the summary judgment for Healthcare of Iowa, and the refusal of proposed jury instructions on state and federal nursing home regulations. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed on all three points on June 16, 2021, leaving the $800,000 compensatory award as the judgment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from RSH Legal
All RSH Legal proven verdicts →Cedar Rapids' insurer paid $8 million to Jerime Mitchell, a quadriplegic man shot by Officer Lucas Jones during a 2016 traffic stop, in what attorneys described as the largest police-misconduct settlement in Iowa history.
A Waterloo man lost all feeling below the waist after a cervical radiofrequency ablation at the C5-6 level in December 2014. A Black Hawk County jury found Dr. Ashar Afzal and Cedar Valley Medical Specialists negligent and awarded $7.36 million to him and his wife. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2021.
Ross Hall died after what his family alleged was negligent cardiology care. The jury awarded $5,500,000, and the allocation is the striking part: only $250,000 for his own pain and suffering before death, and the remaining $5.25 million to his widow and three children for what they lost.
A Cerro Gordo County jury found Good Shepherd, a Mason City nursing home, negligent and willful and wanton in its care of an 84-year-old dementia resident who lost 43 pounds and died of dehydration in April 2015. It awarded her four children $150,000 in compensatory and $750,000 in punitive damages. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2018.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.