An Ohio medical malpractice lawsuit alleged medical negligence relating to four separate back surgeries performed by Defendant Dr. Abubakar Durrani on Plaintiff Patrick Stephenson. The Ohio medical malpractice jury found that Dr. Durrani, who had fled to Pakistan in 2013, was negligent in his care and treatment, failed to acquire informed consent, committed battery, and made fraudulent misrepresentations to Mr. Stephenson.
The jury awarded Mr. Stephenson $820,014 in total damages, including $262,509 for past medical expenses, $525,018 in punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. The trial court reduced the punitive damages to $350,000, pursuant to R.C. 2315.21(D)(2)(b), and applied a set-off of $87,378, reflecting the settlement that Mr. Stephenson received from the other defendants, lowering his damages award to $732,635. The trial court also granted prejudgment interest in the amount of $65,540 upon finding that Defendants failed to undertake a good faith effort to settle the case.
The Defendants appealed. One of the Defendants’ arguments on appeal was that Mr. Stephenson’s counsel impermissibly raised Dr. Durrani’s medical license revocations multiple times during the trial.
Ohio Appellate Court Opinion
The Defendants argued that the playing to the jury of excerpts of various depositions of Dr. Durrani (which the parties called the “collage”) during trial was irrelevant, highly prejudicial, and violative of several evidentiary rules. They also argued that the collage does not discuss Mr. Stephenson’s case or treatment at all; instead, it covers an array of topics
spanning Dr. Durrani’s Pakistani heritage, unrelated malpractice lawsuits [there are about 500 medical malpractice cases pending against Dr. Durrani], medical license revocations, and resume inflation.
The Ohio First District Court of Appeals (“Ohio Appellate Court”) stated in its July 21, 2023 Opinion that evidence that a defendant-doctor’s medical license was revoked is by its very nature prejudicial. It predisposes the jury to find that the doctor acted outside acceptable bounds of competence: “Despite having his licenses revoked for reasons unrelated to his competency as a surgeon … the dogged manner of counsel questioning Dr. Durrani about his revocations in the collage (unrelated to his care of Mr. Stephenson) was designed to lead the jury to draw negative conclusions about his
abilities as a surgeon. Tying his license revocations to his suspensions as a medical provider and to suspended privileges from an array of hospitals only exacerbated the prejudicial impact. For these reasons, we find that the trial court abused its discretion in allowing the questioning about Dr. Durrani’s license revocations and suspended privileges in the collage.”
The Ohio Appellate Court held: “Therefore, the three errors, taken together in the present case, cannot be dismissed as harmless—they were highly prejudicial, and we question whether the jury would have reached the same conclusion but for these errors in Mr. Stephenson’s case. See id. at ¶ 22. Defendants are accordingly entitled to a new trial in which the jury can consider the case afresh, without the prejudicial evidence that intruded into the first trial. The second assignment of error is sustained.”
Source Stephenson v. Durrani, 2023-Ohio-2500.
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