Blame Split on Why Daughter of Writer Died

A jury split the blame Monday in a lawsuit brought by writer Sidney Zion against the hospital where his 18-year-old daughter died, accepting a defense that the young woman failed to reveal she had used cocaine.

The jury technically awarded Zion and his wife, Elsa, $750,000 for their daughter’s pain and suffering. But a finding that Libby Zion was 50% responsible for her own 1984 death means the Zions will get half that amount, $375,000.

The jury also awarded $1 in actual damages. It assessed no punitive damages against New York Hospital and four doctors.

Sidney Zion, a former federal prosecutor, newspaper columnist and author of several books, crusaded for more than a decade to avenge his daughter’s death. Long before his negligence lawsuit, first brought in 1985, came to trial, his daughter’s death became a case study in how big city teaching hospitals treat their patients.

Zion charged that New York Hospital systematically overworked and under-supervised its doctors in training. The case helped lead to New York becoming the first state to regulate intern and resident hours. It also required more supervision by senior doctors.

The Zions’ lawyer, Thomas Moore, had said that hospital doctors erred when they gave Libby Zion the painkiller Demerol to relieve chills and fever while she was on the antidepressant Nardil. The jury found that the interaction of the drugs may have contributed to the death.

Defense lawyers said the care given to Libby Zion was proper, given what was known about her condition. They suggested that her death was caused by a cocaine reaction, possibly aggravated by other drugs.

The jury found that Libby Zion was negligent in not telling hospital emergency room personnel that she also had used cocaine.

She entered New York Hospital the night of March 4, 1984, with a high fever and earache. She died the next morning, strapped to her bed because she had been thrashing about in convulsions.

“It was an outrageous verdict,” an angry Sidney Zion said Monday. “I think this jury disgraced themselves with this verdict. They disgraced justice.

“The cruelest cut of all was the cocaine. New York Hospital, by putting out the big lie many years ago, they scored with it.”

An autopsy showed no cocaine. But defense lawyers said that those tests were done two months after she died and that the hospital found cocaine in her blood and her nose.