$23.5 Million Birth Injury Verdict Against Presence St. Joseph Hospital

On December 19, 2014, a mother in labor at Presence St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago was placed on a fetal heart monitor. The tracings showed the baby in distress, a pattern that calls for an immediate cesarean section. The medical team did not move quickly. More than three hours passed before the C-section was performed.

By the time the baby was delivered, the prolonged loss of oxygen had already done its damage. The infant suffered a severe brain injury, the kind that leaves a child needing care and support for life. The harm did not come from a rare or unforeseeable event. It traced back to the gap between a monitor that signaled an emergency and a delivery that came hours too late.

There was a second failure after birth. The newborn was a candidate for therapeutic hypothermia, a brain-cooling treatment that can limit injury from oxygen deprivation. According to the evidence at trial, the physician assigned to the baby did not know the hospital was equipped to provide it.

The Whiten family brought a medical malpractice claim in Cook County Circuit Court. Geoffrey Fieger tried the case, joined by co-counsel Matthew Patterson and Jack Beam of the Beam Legal Team. The trial was heard before Judge Lorna E. Propes. By then the child was four years old. The plaintiffs' theory was direct: the fetal monitor strips documented distress that required delivery within minutes, not hours, and the hospital's own staff failed to act on what the data showed.

Fieger argued that the hospital had refused to accept responsibility for the child's brain damage throughout the litigation. The defense disputed that the delay caused the injury. After roughly two days of deliberation, the jury sided with the family.

In late March 2019, the Cook County jury returned a verdict of $23.5 million against Presence St. Joseph Hospital, among the largest medical malpractice verdicts reported in Chicago that year. Illinois law does not cap damages in medical malpractice cases, and no reduction of the award has been reported.