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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Legal Newsline) – A Rhode Island judge should have trusted the jury in a medical malpractice case, the state Supreme Court has found.
A June 9 opinion said Washington County associate justice Sarah Taft-Carter was wrong to overrule a jury’s verdict in favor of Dr. Kathleen Cassin. Taft-Carter had ruled after a 2018 trial that the jury’s verdict was against the fair preponderance of the evidence and ordered a new trial for the plaintiff, Pamela Joplin.
Joplin is the executrix of the estate of Patricia Kinney, who died from ovarian cancer in 2014. Kinney had sued Cassin – a gynecologist who performed surgery on the mass that was found to be a rare form of ovarian cancer – for medical malpractice prior to her death.
The lawsuit said Cassin negligently failed to remove cancerous tissue. Part of the mass could not be removed because it was attached the ureter, the decision says.
As a result, Kinney suffered a fistula – a hole in the bowel through which contents from the intestine leak into the abdominal cavity – and other complications, the lawsuit said.
The jury found Cassin did breach the standard of care owed to Kinney but that it wasn’t a contributing factor to Kinney’s death.
The main issue, Justice Taft-Carter found after the verdict, was whether Cassin was required to involve a gynecologic oncologist during her care for Kinney.
“The finding of fault without a finding of causation (was) illogical and not based upon the credible evidence,” Taft-Carter wrote. “Here, liability and proximate cause are completely interwoven and make it logically impossible to find fault without proximate cause.”
The Supreme Court disagreed in an opinion written by Chief Justice Paul Suttell. He says reasonable minds could have come to different conclusions on whether the plaintiff had established that Cassin’s breach of care was the cause of Kinney’s death.
“While plaintiff presented multiple theories regarding the allegation that Dr. Cassin had breached the standard of care, the trial justice’s new-trial decision considered only whether Mrs. Kinney would have been cured of her cancer if a gynecologic oncologist had performed the initial surgery,” Suttell wrote.