$2.88 Million Verdict After Epidural Infection Left Patient Permanently Disabled
After trial: Reduced under the Kansas damages cap; $2.88 million gross verdict.
Won by Shamberg Johnson & Bergman.
A Johnson County jury returned the largest medical-malpractice verdict in the county in more than 25 years after finding a pain clinic and its physician responsible for a spinal MRSA infection that destroyed a patient's quality of life.
What happened
In 2009, Joel Burnette, then 40, sought pain treatment at PainCARE of Overland Park, a Johnson County clinic. Dr. Kimber Eubanks administered an epidural steroid injection to Burnette's spine. A physical therapist had noted edema, or swelling, at the injection site beforehand, but the procedure went ahead anyway. The injection passed through the infected tissue, seeding Burnette's spinal cord with MRSA bacteria.
The infection produced MRSA meningitis and progressed to arachnoiditis, an incurable and progressive inflammation of the central nervous system. Burnette lost bladder and bowel control, became impotent, and lived in constant, severe pain. He exhausted medical options and, in February 2013, died by suicide before the case reached trial. His estate and family continued the lawsuit on his behalf.
Scott E. Nutter of Shamberg Johnson and Bergman tried the case in Johnson County District Court. The defense argued that Burnette's preexisting psychiatric history, not his physical condition, explained his death. The jury rejected that framing. In March 2014 it returned a $2.88 million verdict, at the time the largest medical-malpractice verdict in Johnson County in over 25 years.
Kansas law caps noneconomic damages at $250,000, which reduced the award to approximately $1.67 million. The defendants appealed, arguing among other things that Burnette's suicide broke the chain of legal causation. The Kansas Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in May 2016. Judge Stephen D. Hill, writing for the panel, rejected the causation argument: 'Accumulated wrongs can cause a death just as surely as one.' The Kansas Supreme Court took up the case and, in 2018, affirmed the jury's liability and causation findings while reversing a $550,000 portion of the award that it reclassified as noneconomic damages subject to the statutory cap.
The case drew attention from legal reporters and the state's medical community because it squarely addressed whether a patient's suffering-driven suicide could be attributed to a physician's negligent act. The court's answer, and the jury's verdict before it, treated the cumulative harm to Burnette as a single continuous injury traceable to the clinic's failure to recognize and respond to the infected injection site.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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