$4.25 Million Retrial Verdict for Teen Paralyzed by Steroid Overdose in Hawaii
After trial: Retrial; original $6.15M overturned.
A teenager vacationing in Hawaii developed steroid-induced paralysis after her lupus was treated with high-dose IV pulse therapy; Philip Russotti obtained a $4.25 million retrial verdict after the original $6.15 million award was vacated on appeal.
What happened
In 2003, a fourteen-year-old girl traveling in Hawaii began showing alarming symptoms: a facial rash, slurred speech, and difficulty keeping her balance. Physicians at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu diagnosed her with lupus affecting her brain and put her in the care of Dr. Kara Yamamoto of Kapiolani Medical Specialists, who proposed an aggressive four-week intravenous pulse regimen using Solu-Medrol, a high-dose corticosteroid.
The treatment did not go as hoped. Instead of stabilizing the lupus, the steroid regimen produced acute steroid myopathy: rapid, severe muscle breakdown that left the girl with profound weakness from her hips and shoulders down to her hands and feet. She spent six months in rehabilitation. The muscle damage was permanent, limiting the use of her limbs for everyday tasks.
Her family retained Philip Russotti, who appeared in the Hawaii Circuit Court pro hac vice on behalf of the firm then known as Wingate, Russotti and Shapiro LLP. At the first trial in February 2009, the jury returned a $6.15 million verdict. The trial court then reduced the award to approximately $4.5 million under Hawaii's statutory cap on non-economic damages before entering judgment.
Defense counsel appealed. The Hawaii Supreme Court vacated the judgment in July 2011, ruling that the jury's findings on negligence and informed consent were irreconcilable and that certain expert testimony had been admitted in error. The court ordered a full retrial rather than simply reinstating the reduced award.
At the retrial, the jury again found for the plaintiff and returned a verdict of $4,250,000. The Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals later affirmed the retrial proceedings in a 2014 summary disposition order, with docket number CAAP-13-0001306. The outcome confirmed liability on the informed-consent theory: the family had not been told about alternative dosing options that might have avoided the injury.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Wingate, Russotti, Shapiro, Moses & Halperin, LLP
All Wingate, Russotti, Shapiro, Moses & Halperin, LLP proven verdicts →A Queens County jury awarded $10.7 million to Candida Diego after finding that New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens failed to timely perform a CT scan on a woman who arrived with a skull fracture, allowing a brain herniation to progress until she lapsed into a coma.
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.