$14.5 Million Verdict for Child Born at 25 Weeks After MetroHealth Delayed Emergency C-Section
Won by The Becker Law Firm.
A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $14.5 million to a boy born at 25 weeks with cerebral palsy and developmental delays after MetroHealth Medical Center's staff refused his mother's repeated requests for a C-section and watched the baby's condition deteriorate for more than three hours before performing an emergency delivery.
What happened
Stephanie Stewart came to MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland three separate times in the span of a few days, each time experiencing preterm labor at roughly 24 to 25 weeks of pregnancy. She had delivered a prior child by cesarean section and asked, on each admission, whether she could have a repeat C-section. Each time, staff sent her home or allowed labor to continue. On the final admission, after her membranes had ruptured, she again requested a cesarean. The attending obstetrician declined, pointing to fetal monitor readings that initially showed the baby as stable.
Over the next three and a half hours, the baby's condition on the monitors deteriorated steadily. Only then did staff move to an emergency C-section. By the time her son, Alijah Jones, was delivered at 25 weeks gestation, he had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, developmental delays, and visual impairment. Medical experts who reviewed the case agreed he would require 24-hour attendant care for the rest of his life.
Stewart filed suit against MetroHealth in 2004. The case was dismissed and refiled in 2011, and it eventually went to trial in Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. Attorney Michael Becker of The Becker Law Firm represented the plaintiffs. At trial, Becker argued that the hospital deviated from its own obstetrical emergency protocol by failing to act on repeated signs of fetal distress and by disregarding a patient's informed request for a delivery method she was entitled to choose. Plaintiffs presented expert testimony that a timely cesarean, consistent with the standard of care, would have prevented the hypoxic injury responsible for Alijah's condition.
The jury returned a verdict of $14,500,000. The breakdown included $500,000 for Alijah's past economic damages, $5,000,000 for his noneconomic losses, $8,000,000 for his projected future economic needs including lifetime attendant care, and $1,000,000 for Stewart's own noneconomic damages.
Because MetroHealth is a political subdivision under Ohio law, the trial court applied statutory caps on noneconomic damages and required offsets for collateral source payments, reducing the judgment to $3,451,000. The plaintiffs appealed. The Ohio Eighth District Court of Appeals initially ruled for the family in a July 2016 panel opinion, but that decision was vacated. In the controlling en banc decision issued August 24, 2017 (2017-Ohio-7329), the court held that the collateral-source offset could not be applied to the future-economic award as the trial court had done and reinstated the jury's full $8,000,000 future-damages figure. Added to the $500,000 capped noneconomic award, that brought the total judgment to $8,500,000, which the case was remanded to enter.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from The Becker Law Firm
All The Becker Law Firm proven verdicts →A 12-year-old Cleveland girl suffered a profound brain injury and partial limb loss after touching an energized, downed Cleveland Electric Illuminating power line that had been left unrepaired for days following Hurricane Sandy; her family settled all claims for $60.7 million, the largest individual personal injury settlement in Ohio history.
A Summit County jury awarded $11.35 million to a family whose son sustained permanent brain damage after their obstetrician used forceps rather than performing a cesarean section, and the verdict survived four years of appeals.
Brooks Davison, a husband and father of three who had kept six years of sobriety on Suboxone, died within about two days of leaving Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center after spinal fusion surgery. The Court of Claims found the hospital breached the standard of care by discharging him on a very high oxycodone dose plus diazepam, and awarded his widow, as administrator of his estate, $4,531,700.50. The Tenth District affirmed on October 1, 2026.
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.