Top Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements of 2005

A Philadelphia jury in May 2005 awarded two women a combined $200 million for heart-valve injuries caused by Wyeth's fen-phen diet drugs, with Steve Kherkher of Williams Bailey (now Kherkher Garcia) leading the trial, before a judge granted Wyeth's post-trial motion and the case resolved through a confidential settlement.

A Miami-Dade jury found Eller Media liable for the 1998 electrocution of a 12-year-old boy at a bus shelter wired by unlicensed electricians and awarded $65.1 million.

A federal judge found the Navy's Jacksonville hospital liable for the brain injury of a baby born in distress and entered a $60.9 million award, then the largest Federal Tort Claims Act recovery in the country, before part of it was cut on appeal.

A Middlesex County jury returned the largest personal-injury verdict in Massachusetts history after finding that an obstetrician waited more than five hours to perform an emergency C-section despite clear signs of fetal distress, causing a Dracut boy to develop cerebral palsy.

A San Francisco jury returned what was then the largest personal-injury verdict ever against the city after a Municipal Railway repair truck ran a red light, struck another vehicle, and jumped a sidewalk, killing a four-year-old girl and injuring three others walking with her.

A Bergen County jury ordered stadium concessionaire Aramark and drunk driver Daniel Lanzaro to pay roughly $135 million after Lanzaro, served beer at Giants Stadium despite visible intoxication, crashed into the Verni family's car and left their two-year-old daughter paralyzed from the neck down. The verdict was reversed on appeal in 2006, and the case settled in 2008 for $25 million in cash and annuities.

A Seminole County jury awarded $24.1 million, the largest verdict in county history at the time, after an obstetrician's prolonged vacuum extraction and use of fundal pressure caused a uterine rupture that deprived a newborn girl of oxygen and left her with severe cerebral palsy.

A Cook County jury returned a $17,682,374 verdict for Vernon Hudson after an off-duty Chicago police officer pursuing a homicide suspect without supervisor authorization lost control of her squad car and slammed into Hudson's vehicle on the Eisenhower Expressway, leaving him an incomplete quadriplegic.

Julie Bailey, a 60-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease, was found locked in the kitchen freezer room of the Lewes Convalescent Center hours after she was admitted in December 2002, and she died on January 21, 2003. A Sussex County jury awarded $13 million in compensatory damages to her estate, her husband and her three sons in March 2005. The Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2006.

A Duval County jury found that the collapsing roof and a defective seatbelt of a 2000 Ford Explorer caused a young driver's death in a Virginia rollover, returning $10,184,315 against Ford in the first verdict aimed squarely at the Explorer's roof and belt design.

A Florida jury awarded $10 million to the family of a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome who died after a pharmacy dispensed more than ten times the prescribed dose of methadone.

Windle Turley filed a $400 million federal lawsuit in Dallas on behalf of former Hare Krishna boarding-school students who suffered rape, physical torture, and emotional abuse as children; the litigation resolved in 2005 through a California bankruptcy court settlement paying $9.5 million to hundreds of victims.

A Missoula County jury awarded $8.2 million, including $5.2 million in punitive damages, after Les Schwab sold a retread tire installed on the front steer axle of a cement truck that blew out on US-93 near Ronan, killing two women.

Forest Horne secured a $7.5 million jury verdict for a retired CSX railroad worker whose decades of on-the-job asbestos exposure caused malignant mesothelioma, a verdict the North Carolina Court of Appeals unanimously upheld in 2006.

A Hardee County jury awarded $5 million to the parents of Michael Lieux, a former Marine with a brain injury who died of positional asphyxia after FINR staff pinned him face-down using a technique the facility called 'therapeutic containment.'

A Cook County jury awarded Betty Kunz $3.2 million in 2005 after finding Little Company of Mary Hospital liable for a nurse's error that put the kidney-toxic antibiotic gentamicin on her nursing-home transfer form when she was 75. She suffered permanent kidney failure and needs dialysis for life. The jury cleared the nursing home's doctor and the other defendants. In 2007 the Appellate Court affirmed liability and ordered a new trial limited to past and future medical expenses.

Eddie Gentry, 54, a vice president of lending at Educators Credit Union, was struck in a Nashville crosswalk on November 20, 2001 and died eight days later. A Davidson County jury found driver Dereck Cook 75 percent at fault and set damages at $1,638,561. The court directed a verdict for Metro on the failed 'Don't Walk' bulb claim. Judgment after Gentry's 25 percent share of fault was $1,228,921.

In March 2005 a Delaware County, Ohio jury awarded the estate of Jeffrey Heintzelman $1,014,186 for his wrongful death, finding no comparative fault. Heintzelman was electrocuted in July 2002 by an unprotected outlet feeding an air conditioner condensate pump that contractor Thomas Martel had installed. The jury separately awarded his widow $2,650,000 for emotional distress. In 2006 the Fifth District upheld the estate's award and struck the widow's.

A federal judge found Tripler Army Medical Center negligent in supervising a nurse who sexually assaulted a sedated intensive care patient in March 2001. After a six-day bench trial, the court awarded $906,000 under the Federal Tort Claims Act: $816,000 to the patient and $90,000 to her husband for loss of consortium.

A 16-year-old was struck in the left eye by a piece of metal while walking under a Safway Steel Products scaffold in Brooklyn in 1999, permanently damaging his retina. Safway's answer was struck after two years of ignoring discovery orders, and a Kings County inquest produced a $1.05 million judgment in 2005. The Appellate Division reduced it to $700,000 in 2007, and the Court of Appeals affirmed in 2008.