A Brain-Injured Baby at a Navy Hospital and a Record $60.9 Million Federal Tort Claims Award

On June 10 and 11, 2003, a Navy serviceman's wife went to the obstetrics unit at the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, to deliver her first child. The labor stretched across two days and did not go as it should have. The clinic staff failed to recognize and act on signs that the baby was in distress, and the delivery was mishandled. The child was born with severe, permanent brain damage.

The injury was the kind that does not improve. The boy would need help with feeding, movement, and nearly every basic function for the rest of his life. His father was an active-duty sailor, and his mother had come to a military hospital expecting the ordinary birth of a healthy baby. Because the care was provided at a federal facility, the family could not bring a standard malpractice suit against the individual doctors. Their only route was the Federal Tort Claims Act, the law that lets people sue the United States itself for the negligence of its employees. Under that statute a judge, not a jury, decides both fault and damages.

Colson Hicks Eidson took the case to an 11-day bench trial in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Deborah Gander handled much of the courtroom work, with Ervin Gonzalez. The firm walked the court through the hours of labor and the fetal monitoring data, and argued that every provider who treated the mother had departed from the accepted standard of care. The injury, the firm showed, was the result of those failures and not an unavoidable complication of childbirth.

Judge Jose A. Gonzalez agreed. He found the United States liable and entered an award the firm and the legal press reported as $60.9 million, at the time the largest recovery ever in a Federal Tort Claims Act case in the country. The judgment covered the child's lifetime medical and economic needs along with non-economic damages for the boy and both parents.

The figure did not stand in full. The trial court itself trimmed the parents' non-economic damages, bringing the judgment to roughly $40.5 million. On appeal in 2008, the Eleventh Circuit, in Bravo v. United States, 532 F.3d 1154, vacated the parents' remaining $20 million in non-economic damages as excessive and sent that piece back to the district court for reconsideration. The ruling that the government was liable for the child's injuries was left in place.

The child had died in 2006, before the appeal was decided.