Attorney Kenneth Suggs Wins $4.4 Million for Grieving Family
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Fetal heart rate charts lead jury to medmal award
By Fred Horlbeck

Lawyers for a couple who won a $4.4 million verdict in a York County medmal case said an electronic display of fetal monitoring data helped the jury understand the medical technicalities behind the plaintiffs' claims.

And when it came time to discuss damages, attorney Kenneth Suggs of Columbia told the jury of the hardships the parents endured as they cared for their little girl, Sierra, after she suffered a brain injury at birth at Piedmont Medical Center in Rock Hill.

"Frankly, I talked more about what the family went through than the dollars themselves," Suggs said. "This was an extraordinarily painful process for Sierra because she had unremitting seizures."

Even the judge's decision 10 minutes before trial to ditch their other display of tech wizardry a PowerPoint presentation didn't faze them. Lawyer Gerald Jowers of Columbia resorted to a projector as well as paper, a pen and an easel for his opening arguments.

"So the things that I had in the PowerPoint, the points I wanted to make, I actually wrote down as I was talking. I really had to do it on the fly," Jowers said.

The results spoke for themselves as the jury returned from nine hours of deliberations on Feb. 13 to award $2 million to Sierra's estate for her pain and suffering, $390,000 for medical bills and $2 million to the parents.

Suggs said it was "a really fair verdict and a very thoughtful verdict."

Jurors released the doctor from liability but upheld wrongful-death and survival actions against Piedmont.

The verdict came exactly one year after 4-year-old Sierra Wilson died on Feb. 13, 2008, after a life of repeated seizures.

"At the end, every time a door would slam or a cabinet would close, she would go into a seizure. Her parents, one of them, had to be holding her or with her at all times," Suggs said. "And they had no outside help for that."

Robin and Brice Wilson of Fort Lawn sued the hospital and an obstetrician for negligence and gross negligence after their daughter was born in 2003 with a brain injury resulting from oxygen deprivation. They said she suffered from mental retardation, cerebral palsy and repeated seizures throughout her life.

At birth, the child "was blue, limp, not breathing, had no reflexes and had a low heart rate," the plaintiffs said in their amended complaint.

A lawyer for Piedmont declined to comment. Last week, the hospital issued a statement that expressed sympathy to the parents but also raised the possibility of an appeal.

"Despite the verdict in this case, we feel that our staff acted appropriately. It is unfortunate that despite the high-quality care provided, the outcome was not what anyone desired," the statement said.

"We were very surprised by the verdict in this case and are reviewing our legal options at this time, including an appeal." The case is Estate of Wilson v. Amisub of S.C., d/b/a Piedmont Medical Center, et al., civil action No. 2006-CP-46-2891.

The case arose when Robin Williams, suffering from nausea and vomiting, went to the hospital on Nov. 16, 2003, two days before she was scheduled to give birth by induced labor.

Suggs argued that the hospital was liable for assigning a nurse trainee to monitor her. He said the nurse "grossly misread" fetal heart- monitoring information showing the baby was in danger and also failed to get the information to Wilson's doctor.

"Had any of this information been communicated to a careful doctor, the doctor would have come in, looked at this patient … and, at the very least, admitted her to the hospital right there so you could continue to observe and, most likely, would have gone ahead and induced labor," Suggs said.

Instead, Williams went home after five hours, the plaintiffs said. After she returned on Nov. 18, Sierra was born. Six hours later, the baby started having seizures.

Successful strategies
The plaintiffs' case largely hinged on whether the nurse correctly read the fetal monitoring information, also known as "strips." The defense said the strips showed no decelerations in the baby's heartbeat when her mother was at the hospital on Nov. 16, 2003. They also produced evidence of some heartbeat accelerations, Suggs said.

But Suggs said he and Jowers displayed an electronic graph showing the baby's heartbeat was decelerating.

"They had an OB from Spartanburg who said, 'I don't see any decelerations,'" Suggs said. "But we put the strips up for the jury to see, drew a red line on the strips along what the nurse was calling the baseline and argued the Bible: 'He who hath eyes, let him see.' Anybody on the jury, I think, could see it for themselves."

The baseline showed the baby's average heart rate, he said.

The defense also put up testimony from a placental pathologist who said the mother had a placental condition that was several weeks old. Such a condition has been linked to cerebral palsy.

But the plaintiffs' lawyers seized on his statement that an "acute event" had interrupted the flow of blood to the placenta three to 12 hours before the birth.

That "put it right in the time slot where we said she should have been in the hospital," Suggs said.

Low-tech presentation
Jowers said an important part of the case was "communicating some difficult medical concepts to the jury."

"Of course, we had lived with this case for nearly three years," he said. "So here we are, we've got one week to tell Sierra Wilson's story."

The Wilsons' lawyers had to understand and convey to the jury the complexities of placental pathology, fetal monitoring and obstetrics. That's where tools such as Jowers' PowerPoint presentation were likely to come in handy.

So when Judge John Hayes struck it in response to defense objections, Jowers acted fast to make up for losing the presentation he had taken two days to prepare.

He went through the medical records, picked out key documents and displayed them with the projector. That, along with the easel, worked fine, he said.

"You know, by this time in the case, I knew the records and I knew the facts so well that it really was not that frightening to just stand up and talk about it," he said.

Questions or comments may be directed to the writer at fred.horlbeck@sc.lawyersweekly.com

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