A California manufacturer of medical devices ordered to pay out a record $40.1 million after a machine cooked a man’s heart will fight a Snohomish County jury’s decision in the state’s Court of Appeals.
Edwards Lifesciences Inc. filed an appeal for the higher court to review the verdict. Jurors found Edwards failed to warn users about dangers of a machine that malfunctioned. The jury awarded $40.1 million in damages, mostly to the man’s Mount Vernon family. Paramjit Singh’s heart was burned so badly it would not function and he had to have a heart transplant.
The award is believed to be the largest civil-jury verdict ever in Snohomish County, and one of the largest in the state.
A Snohomish County judge in March upheld the jury’s decision.
The company “chose to cross their fingers and roll the dice,” gambling with people’s lives, a Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Linda Krese said.
She declined to reduce both compensatory and punitive damages to Singh, his wife and their three children. The jury also awarded Providence Everett Medical Center $310,000.
The judge also turned down Edwards’ motion for a new trial.
The company’s attorney has argued that the trial judge shouldn’t have allowed an instruction on the law that told jurors to disregard whether either Singh or Edwards had insurance. They also argued that the dollar awards were excessive, and that it was wrong for the jury to conclude Edwards’ actions were “despicable,” which led to punitive damages of more than $8 million.
The jury ruled that Edwards, of Irvine, Calif., bears almost all the blame for what happened to Singh, 54, because it didn’t tell doctors about flaws in the device that could cause overheating under certain circumstances.
Singh went into Providence in October 2004 for relatively routine heart bypass surgery. A monitor made by Edwards malfunctioned, turned off fail-safe devices and caused a catheter inserted into Singh’s heart to reach temperatures up to 500 degrees.
Reporter Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463 or hefley@heraldnet.com.
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