Atlantic County Jury Awards $37.5 Million to Teenager With Cerebral Palsy Over Pitocin Errors at His Birth
After trial: No appellate decision reversing or reducing the award had been reported as of mid 2026.
An Atlantic County jury awarded $37,548,096 to a 16-year-old with hemiplegic cerebral palsy, finding that an obstetrician and two labor and delivery nurses at Shore Memorial Hospital mismanaged Pitocin during his 2008 birth and caused a stroke that injured his brain.
What happened
The boy at the center of this case was born on June 10, 2008, at Shore Memorial Hospital in Somers Point, New Jersey, the Atlantic County facility now known as Shore Medical Center. When his mother arrived in labor, the delivery team augmented her contractions with Pitocin, a synthetic form of oxytocin that increases the frequency, duration, and intensity of uterine contractions. The drug is common in delivery rooms, but its manufacturer warns that dosing must be managed carefully because overstimulated contractions can put stress on the fetus.
According to the family's suit, that warning went unheeded. Nurses raised the Pitocin dose to the maximum allowable level without adequately monitoring mother and baby, and the excessive uterine activity restricted blood flow to the baby's brain. During childbirth he suffered an ischemic stroke on the right side of his brain. The stroke left him with hemiplegic cerebral palsy affecting the left side of his body. He has limited use of his left hand and walks with a limp.
Birth injury cases often take years to reach a courtroom, in part because a child's deficits and future needs become clearer with age. This one took sixteen. By the time the case was tried in the summer of 2024, the plaintiff was a 16-year-old, and the evidence centered on what his medical care, working life, and daily existence would require over the decades ahead.
Thomas J. Vesper and Dara A. Quattrone of Westmoreland Vesper Quattrone and Beers tried the case for the family in the Superior Court of New Jersey in Atlantic County, before Judge Danielle J. Walcoff. The defendants were the on-call obstetrician and two labor and delivery nurses. On July 31, 2024, the jury found the defendants negligent and apportioned fault at 80 percent to the nurses and 20 percent to the obstetrician.
The award totaled $37,548,096. Jurors allocated $29,021,150 for pain, suffering, disability, impairment, and loss of enjoyment of life, plus $5,481,023 for future life care expenses and $3,045,923 for lost future income. TopVerdict ranked the result as the third largest jury verdict in New Jersey in 2024, and the firm describes it as the third largest verdict of any kind in Atlantic County history.
As of research in September 2026, no published appellate decision has reversed or reduced the award. The case was tried under the caption Markert v. Shore Memorial Hospital in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Atlantic County.
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.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.