Miscellaneous

Ritter Doctors Cleared by Jury

By Anne Skove, Esq.

The family of the late John Ritter was not able to show that doctors who treated him made faulty diagnoses or failed to act to save him from a fatal heart condition.

Nine out of 12 jurors voted to clear the doctors on trial. One explained that the panel decided other doctors would have acted similarly under the same circumstances, with the same sad result. This was so even though an x-ray was ordered, but never performed, as soon as Ritter entered the ER.

Jurors also found that Ritter himself neglected to follow up with treatment recommended by one of the doctors being sued, although they did not find this to be a cause of his death.

One of the 3 jurors in the minority felt the doctors missed the mark and should be held responsible.

Both sides agreed that the jury system worked. No comment, however, on what the plaintiffs think about non-unanimous verdicts. The family received large settlements from other health care providers and the hospital earlier.

See Doctors Cleared of Negligence in John Ritter's Death, AP, LA Times (March 14, 2008), and Revisiting the Unanimity Requirement: The Behavior of the Non-Unanimous Civil Jury, Shari Seidman Diamond, Mary R. Rose, and Beth Murphy, Northwestern University Law Review, vol. 100, no. 1 (2006). See also Ritter Case Update and Ritter Rx, both from court-o-rama.

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).