Doctor Found Liable for Baby’s Blindness

In a stunning blow to St. Joseph Hospital, a civil jury Monday found one of the hospital’s leading physicians negligent for failing to diagnose and treat a common but curable eye disease that left a premature baby blind.

After two days of deliberations, jurors announced that 2 1/2-year-old Madison Scott’s blindness was worth $1.43 million in economic damages and pain and suffering.

The child’s family was represented by Mark Hiepler, a nationally known HMO malpractice lawyer from Oxnard.

Jurors decided that Dr. Robert L. Hillyard, director of St. Joseph’s special care nursery, is liable for 42% of those costs. Hillyard had acted as Madison’s primary doctor when she was born three months premature in August 1996.

The verdict amounts to the value today of Madison’s lost wages and her future medical expenses, which the jury determined to be $6.345 million over her lifetime.

Madison’s lawyers had asked for $3.2 million for future medical costs alone, and asked the jury to decide the rest. But cradling his sleepy child outside the courtroom, Curt Scott, Madison’s father, said he was happy with the verdict.

“I’m really hopeful that this will avert a tragedy for other parents, and that other babies won’t slip through the cracks and lose their sight,” he said. “I think it’s sufficient.”

Hillyard refused to settle, arguing in court that he was not responsible for Madison’s blindness.

Hillyard actually “pulled the baby through life and death, and this is the thanks he gets,” said his attorney, Tony Discoe, in closing arguments. But Hiepler told jurors that retinopathy of prematurity, a disease common to premature babies and easily curable if diagnosed early, robbed Madison’s sight.

He argued that Hillyard could have prevented the disease had he ensured that Madison’s eyes were reexamined after an initial checkup after her birth.

A specialist diagnosed the disease a month later. By then, it was too late to save her eyesight.

“This whole thing was about accountability, responsibility,” Hiepler said after the verdict. “No premature babies should go through this.”

Hiepler won a landmark $89-million jury verdict in 1993 against HealthNet for denying a bone marrow transplant to his sister, a breast cancer patient who died that same year.