The Jury Put $250,000 on What He Suffered Before He Died and $5.25 Million on What His Family Lost Afterwards.
After trial: The verdict stands at $5,500,000, returned in November 2021 in Scott County, and no Iowa appellate opinion has been reported, so no appeal is recorded. It includes $250,000 for pre-death pain and suffering and consortium awards to the spouse and three children, all arising from the single death.
Won by RSH Legal.
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.
What happened
Ross Hall died. His family's case was that his cardiologist, Jon A. Robken, was negligent in the care and treatment that led to it. Robken denied the allegations.
The trial took place in Scott County before Judge Stuart P. Werling in November 2021. The jury found for the family and awarded $5,500,000.
How it divided that sum is worth looking at, because it is the opposite of the usual shape. Only $250,000 was allocated to Ross Hall's own pain and suffering before his death. The remaining $5,250,000 went to the people left behind: $2,250,000 to his widow for loss of spousal consortium, and $1,000,000 each to three children for loss of parental consortium.
Almost the entire award is non-economic. That is precisely the kind of verdict Iowa's legislature has since moved against, and the timing here is the whole story.
Iowa had no medical-malpractice damages cap at all until July 1, 2017. From that date until February 15, 2023 a $250,000 cap on non-economic damages existed but was displaced whenever the case involved death or substantial injury, and the displacement had no ceiling of its own. A death case in that window was therefore uncapped. For a cause of action accruing on or after February 16, 2023, House File 161 replaced the open-ended exception with a hard limit: $1,000,000, or $2,000,000 where a licensed hospital is a defendant.
No hospital was a defendant here. An identical verdict on identical facts, if the negligence happened today, would be cut to $1,000,000.
The family was represented by Tim Semelroth, Pressley Henningsen and Benjamin Long of RSH Legal in Cedar Rapids, with Farl Greene of Ball, Kirk and Holm and Nile Hicks.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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