Defendant's Expert Sanctioned in Medical Malpractice Case

According to today's Boston Globe, a Massachusetts trial court has sanctioned a defense witness for intentionally giving misleading testimony in a medical malpractice case. The plaintiff sustained permanent and disabling neurological damage after suffering a stroke. Her family blamed the ER physician's failure to administer the drug t-PA. A 1995 study showed that prompt administration of t-PA can minimize the damage from strokes by dissolving the blood clots that cause them. To rebut the study, the ER physician called a neurologist, who testified that the 1995 study excluded cancer patients, and that its results were therefore inapplicable to the plaintiff, who had emerged from treatment for breast cancer just before her stroke. The jury found for the defense.

The only problem, it transpires, was that the 1995 study did not in fact exclude cancer patients. Quite the contrary, 59 of the 600 study subjects had suffered from cancer. The trial judge was unconvinced by the neurologist's explanation at a post-trial hearing, and concluded that the expert intentionally misled the jury by implying a familiarity with the data that he did not in fact possess. The judge set a new trial and ordered the expert to pay $20,000 toward plaintiffs' legal fees, in addition to sanctions imposed on the defendant.

The expert's lawyer calls this "a chilling event to anyone who provides or is thinking about providing any expert testimony." That seems slightly hyperbolic, inasmuch as candid and/or accurate testimony would presumably enjoy safe harbor. Nevertheless, the expert and the defendant both promise to pursue appellate relief.