By Brendan Kirby | bkirby@al.com
on February 04, 2013 at 3:36 PM, updated February 04, 2013 at 4:18 PM
http://blog.al.com/live/2013/02/140_million_verdict_against_th.html
A $140 million verdict against Thomas Hospital in December was the seventh-largest jury award in the county last year, according to Lawyers USA.
The civil case, argued by Mobile powerhouse firm Cunningham Bounds LLC, involved the death of a woman who received an overdose of medication at Mercy Medical in 2008. Attorneys for the family of Sharron Juno put on evidence that a medical transcriptionist in India made an error in copying down the prescribed dosage of insulin.
Compounding the error, according to the testimony, a nurse at the Fairhope hospital failed to use the original document prepared by the doctor when she produced a physician admission form.
Juno got a lethal dose of the insulin from Mercy Medical staffers who relied on the erroneous physician admission form from the hospital. It was 10 times the amount her doctor had prescribed when he sent her to Mercy Medical for further treatment.
Although it was the richest civil judgment in Baldwin County’s history, it paled by comparison to the largest judgment in the United States last year. In that case, decided in May, a jury ordered a convenience store to pay $716.5 million for selling alcohol to a teenager who got into a traffic accident and killed the driver of another car in Florida’s Hillsboro County.
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