Family, foundation settle malpractice case. Waynesboro couple get $1.35 million for their son, endint birth-injury lawsuit
CHARLOTTESVILLE -- A Waynesboro couple's four-year legal fight to gain help for their disabled son ended yesterday in a $1.35 million settlement.
"All the time it's taken and the relief of it being over," David Morris said yesterday, explaining the emotion he felt.
As papers ending the family's legal struggle were signed in court, Morris broke into tears. He asked Charlottesville Circuit Judge Edward L. "Ted" Hogshire if he'd done the right thing.
Asphyxiated at birth in September 2001, Hunter Morris has cerebral palsy and brain damage. He will never live independently.
In court papers, the Morrises alleged that doctors at the University of Virginia Medical Center failed to respond to their son's deteriorating condition in the hours before he was born. In legal responses, the defendants denied the allegations.
In the intervening years, the foundation employing the doctors argued that it and the doctors were immune from suit -- even in cases where, like the Morrises, a patient is not indigent -- because of the charity care they provide to indigent patients.
Yesterday, two months after the state Supreme Court tossed out the charitable immunity defense, the case came to a close. The settlement could set a precedent for as many as a dozen pending malpractice cases where doctors and foundations have used the charitable immunity defense.
The settlement pales by comparison with similar cases in other states where limitations on damage awards do not exist. At the time of Hunter's birth, judgments under Virginia law could not exceed $1.6 million. This summer, the so-called cap will be $2 million.
"This is the best that can be made of a bad situation," one of the Morrises' lawyers, Matthew B. Murray, told the court yesterday. "The cap [on malpractice awards] imposes a burden on the most severely injured," he said, noting that costs of care far exceed possible awards in Virginia.
Hunter's life-care plan predicts that it will cost about $9 million.
Also, legal fees in the case will take some 40 percent of the award. Murray predicted that going to trial would have added tens of thousand of dollars to legal costs with no certainty of a favorable verdict or one equaling the settlement amount.
"We hope we can build a house that will be better suited to Hunter, with wider doors and room to move around in with his wheelchair," David Morris said. "And we need a van that can transport him and his wheelchair."
Combining three cases, the state Supreme Court ruled in its 28-page charitable immunity opinion that the U.Va. Foundation "follows the model of a profitable commercial business, not a charitable institution."
The court found that charitable losses, after state reimbursements and other factors, represented only 0.66 percent of the $225,898,000 in revenue generated in 2005 by foundation doctors.
"There was no validity to the charitable defense whatsoever," Murray said outside court yesterday.
An attorney for the U.Va. Health Services Foundation declined to comment.
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or bmckelway@timesdispatch.com.