Goodell DeVries recently attained a landmark appellate win on behalf of a Maryland hospital. On October 2, the Appellate Court of Maryland vacated the $34,770,293 Baltimore City Circuit Court verdict and judgment entered in 2021. Derek Stikeleather, with Janet Forero and Sean Gugerty, briefed and argued the appeal in 2022 and, with four-plus years of post-judgment interest, the judgment had grown to over $49M. The Court’s 76-page unreported opinion (Tang, J.) agreed with the hospital that the trial court improperly excluded evidence of the mother’s negligent conduct while pregnant by misapplying CJP Section 10-910, the Maryland law that prevents imputing a parent’s negligence to a plaintiff child. Because the error “permeated the trial,” the judgment is vacated and the case remanded for a new trial.
With this victory, Goodell DeVries’s appellate team has now prevailed in each of the three largest appeals of birth-injury verdicts in Maryland history:
|
Case
|
Verdict
|
Final Judgment
|
Appellate
Result
|
Year
|
|
Byrom
|
$229M
|
$205M
|
JNOV
|
2021
|
|
Martinez
|
$55M
|
$28M
|
Vacated
|
2013
|
|
Biggs
|
$34M
|
$34M
|
Vacated
|
2025
|
