Missed Carotid Blockage, Massive Stroke: A $5.77 Million Malpractice Verdict

Sharon K. Burke managed a men's wear store and was 40 years old when her body started sending warnings. In late 1999 she felt numbness and tingling in her arms and legs, mostly on one side. Her doctors ordered an MRI of her brain that December, and a second scan followed in July 2000.

The July images showed a problem. One of the major vessels feeding her brain, the right internal carotid artery, carried evidence of a blockage that put her at high risk of a stroke. The radiologist who read the film, Dr. William L. Higgins of Drs. Groover, Christie & Merritt, did not flag it as an occlusion. He attributed the finding to "turbulent flow" and called it "artifactual," a reading he reached without ordering confirmatory tests and without comparing the July scan against the December one.

The clot kept building. On the morning of October 23, 2000, Burke suffered a massive stroke at home, caused by clots in the same right carotid artery the scan had hinted at months earlier. The injury was catastrophic and permanent. In her mid-40s she was left functioning at roughly the level of an 80-year-old, struggling with confusion and communication, and she came to depend on her elderly mother for daily care.

Patrick Malone represented Burke in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, with co-counsel Raymond B. Herschthal. The case turned on what the July MRI actually showed and what a careful radiologist should have done with it. Malone's team established that the blockage was visible, that the proper response was further imaging and blood-thinning treatment, and that timely care would have prevented the stroke. The defense argued the finding looked like turbulent flow rather than a true occlusion.

On March 19, 2004, the jury found the radiology group and a treating physician jointly and severally liable for failing to diagnose and treat the carotid blockage before the stroke. It cleared one other defendant. The award came to $5,774,156.07, including $2 million for non-economic damages.

The defendants appealed. In 2007 the District of Columbia Court of Appeals upheld the finding of malpractice but ruled that Maryland's statutory cap on non-economic damages governed Burke's claim, which reduced that portion of the award below the $2 million the jury had set. The liability verdict against the radiology practice stood.