$4.69 Million Verdict for Latex Allergy Death at Baptist Hospital, Quietly Settled for About $2.8 Million
After trial: Settled for approximately $2.8 million, which one legal blog reported as an understanding, not a confirmed figure. The jury returned $4,691,000 in June 2009 and the Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed on December 13, 2011, but the parties had settled in late November 2011 and moved to vacate.
Won by Sweet & Associates, PLLC.
Ellen Kelly died after latex exposure during surgery at Baptist Hospital in Jackson. A form from an earlier procedure at the same hospital already recorded her latex allergy. The jury found against the hospital and cleared the physicians, on the reasoning that the nurses and the doctors owed separate duties.
What happened
Ellen Kelly died as a result of latex exposure during a surgical procedure at Baptist Hospital in Jackson.
The fact that carried the case is a piece of paper. A form completed for an earlier procedure at the same hospital already documented that she was allergic to latex. It was in the hospital's own records. Her nurses did not act on it.
The jury separated the defendants. It returned a verdict against Mississippi Baptist Health Systems and exonerated the physician defendants, and the Mississippi Court of Appeals later upheld that split, holding that the doctors and the nurses owed distinct duties and that a jury was entitled to find one breached and the other not.
The damages were itemized: $29,604.52 in funeral and medical expenses, $992,109 for loss of household services, $1,415,880 in lost wages, and $2,253,065.48 for pain and suffering. A total of $4,691,000.
Mississippi's $500,000 cap on non-economic damages in medical-malpractice cases did not apply. The alleged malpractice occurred in 2000 and the suit was filed in 2001, both before the tort-reform statute that created the cap. This is one of a shrinking number of Mississippi medical cases where the jury's non-economic figure was allowed to stand as written.
What actually happened next is the part that does not appear in the reported law. In late November 2011 the parties settled, for a figure reported as roughly $2.8 million. On December 13, 2011 the Court of Appeals issued its opinion affirming the full $4,691,000 verdict, apparently without knowing the case had already resolved. Two days after that, the parties jointly moved to dismiss the appeal and to vacate the opinion.
So the published law shows a clean affirmance of $4,691,000 and the money that changed hands was closer to $2.8 million. We record the recovery, not the affirmance.
Ellen Kelly's family was represented by G. Joseph Diaz Jr., Christopher P. Williams, and Dennis C. Sweet III of Sweet and Associates in Jackson.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.