County Rejects Plan to Move Up 1995 Trial Over Death of Baby : Malpractice case: The parents’ attorney offers to hire a private judge. But an official says that would not allow an appeal over damages.

Los Angeles County attorneys, after pledging to move toward conclusion of an embarrassing medical malpractice lawsuit prompted by the death of a Northridge infant, have rejected an offer that would have avoided a delay of three or more years.

The attorney representing the child’s parents has offered to pay the estimated $20,000 it would cost to hire a private judge so a trial could begin next year, but the county refused the offer.

The case now is set for trial in San Fernando Superior Court on June 8, 1995, more than five years after 5-day-old Steven Ruiz, who was born at the county’s Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, died of an unnoticed birth defect.

During unusually contentious pretrial litigation, attorneys for the county and for one of the three nursing registries named in the suit claimed that a healthy baby born at Olive View was switched with one that was fatally ill and had been born elsewhere.

Lacking evidence to prove that claim, the county last June ordered sophisticated genetic tests of tissue collected from the fetus and Patricia Chavez, 17, and her boyfriend, Reynaldo Ruiz, 21. But the tests determined that they were the dead baby’s likely parents.

After the tests, Assistant County Counsel Robert Ambrose said, “There’s been enough on this . . . we would like to see if we can conclude it if we can.” But two mediation sessions before retired Superior Court Judge Robert Nye failed to produce a settlement.

Aileen N. Goldstein, the Burbank attorney representing the dead child’s parents, said, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

She accused the county of deliberately stalling “so that memories will fade, the evidence will grow stale, inflation will eat away her monetary recovery and time will erode interest in the case.”

Robert Alaniz, a spokesman for Supervisor Gloria Molina, said Thursday that the offer was rejected because hiring a private judge would not allow the county to appeal if exorbitant damages were awarded to the plaintiffs.

San Fernando Superior Court Presiding Judge David M. Schacter said a shortage of judges and a growing burden of criminal cases, which take precedence over civil cases, mean that delays of four years or more before the start of civil trials are commonplace.

“If there is cooperation among the parties, there are many alternatives” for bringing litigation to a close, including the hiring of private judges, Schacter said. “If there is a vitriolic relationship between the parties . . . there will be delays.”

Goldstein originally sought $250,000 in damages for the medical malpractice, which she alleges led to the baby’s death, and unspecified additional damages. She said a settlement offer made by the county was “outrageously low” and that, in order to conclude the matter, she had offered to pay for a retired judge to hear the case. She declined to reveal the amount of the offer.

In a Nov. 4 letter rejecting the offer to hire a judge, Leonard Torres, a private attorney hired by the county, wrote that Nye had “strongly recommended” that Goldstein accept a proposed settlement for the parents.

But Goldstein said Nye made no such recommendation. Rather, she said, Nye told her that the county’s offer was “the worst I could do if I took the case to trial.”

Attorneys for the county declined comment on the case.

Sources familiar with the litigation said that Goldstein has since reached an agreement with two of the three nursing registries that supplied the nurses who were on duty when the baby was born and soon after.

She would not reveal the amount of that settlement. She said, however, that the county’s attorneys are seeking to deduct whatever amount the registries settle for from the county’s offer.

The plaintiffs contend that the nurses or the doctors at the hospital should have detected that the baby was born with a sealed anus and could not eliminate waste.

Goldstein said her client deserves to receive damages in excess of $250,000 because she witnessed her child’s agonizing death and because the county intentionally caused her emotional pain by falsely alleging that she had switched her own infant for another that was about to die.

The child died two days after it was brought home from Olive View, despite emergency surgery at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, where it was taken after it turned blue and stopped breathing.