$130M ERROR
Jury socks L.I. hospital over girl’s brain damage
AFTER A decade-long legal battle, a Long Island family has been awarded $130 million for medical mistakes that left their little girl “a prisoner in her own body” — the second largest malpractice verdict in state history.
Danni and Frank Reilly sued St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, L.I., charging the hospital’s mistakes were to blame for their daughter Shannon being born with severe brain damage in 2002.
The now-10-year-old girl “suffers from a form of cerebral palsy that makes her a prisoner in her own body,” said the family’s lawyer, Thomas Moore. “She cannot walk and she cannot speak. But she hears and understands and is exquisitely aware of everything that is going on around her.”
Shortly before Shannon’s case was set for trial in 2009, the hospital offered the Reillys $8 million to settle the case.
Moore, one of the top malpractice lawyers in the country, told the family that amount wouldn’t come close to paying for their daughter’s medical expenses, and advised them to go to trial.
Moore said he had rejected settlement offers of $8 million or more 34 times before in his career, and each time won a bigger verdict or netted a larger settlement for his clients.
But not that time. The jury ruled for the hospital, and found the Reillys should get nothing.
They “got it horribly wrong,” Moore said.
He appealed the ruling as “irrational” and against the weight of the evidence, which showed a nurse hadn’t followed proper procedure in monitoring Shannon before she was born.
An appeals court agreed and said the Reillys should get a new trial.
They did last year — and it ended in a hung jury.
The second retrial started last month in Suffolk County Supreme Court, and ended Tuesday with the mammoth $130 million verdict.
“The agony of the last 10 years has finally ended,” said Danni, a nurse, and Frank, a solar equipment salesman, in a statement. “Our beloved daughter will be protected for the rest of her life.”
Moore said the award “will enable Shannon to get the care and therapies that she not only needs but deserves,” and “will give this girl a fighting chance to escape the shackles that trap her.”
A hospital rep did not return a call for comment.