A state appellate court has reduced a medical malpractice judgment against a physician and Westchester Medical Center by $1 million.
A panel of four justices on the Second Appellate Court ruled on July 17 that a Westchester Supreme Court jury fairly interpreted the evidence but that two types of pain and suffering were duplicative.
“We conclude that the award of damages for pre-impact terror is inappropriate,” the judges found, and “should be set aside and vacated.”
In 2008, Antonio Molina III was treated for several days at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla. He complained of coughing up blood, shortness of breath and a mild burning in his chest. He suffered a heart attack at the hospital; doctors determined that one of his heart vessels was completely obstructed; and an attempt to insert a stent failed.
For three years, he was treated for congestive heart failure at different hospitals. In October 2011, he died at Yale New Haven Hospital.
In 2013, Antonio Molina IV, of  White Plains, sued the hospital and several doctors in Westchester Supreme Court, as administrator of his father’s estate. He alleged that the doctors had departed from accepted standards of medical practice by failing to timely diagnose and treat the heart attack.
In 2017, a jury found Westchester Medical Center and internal medicine physician Randy A. Goldberg liable for damages.
In 2019, Westchester Supreme Court Justice Lawrence H. Ecker endorsed a $3.9 million judgment, including $1 million for emotional pain and suffering characterized as pre-impact terror, and $1 million for pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life.
The hospital appealed the decision, arguing in part that the jury verdict was contrary to the weight of the evidence.
The appellate judges concluded that sufficient evidence was presented at trial to establish that doctors departed from accepted standards of medical practice. A reasonable person could conclude, they said, that it was more probable than not that the doctors’ failures were a substantial factor in causing Molina’s injuries and diminished his chance of a better outcome.
But emotional pain and suffering from pre-impact terror should not have been considered as a separate category of damages, the judges ruled.
Pre-impact terror was defined as the time Molina endured the belief that he was going to die to the moment he died. Pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment of life were defined as the moment of the heart attack to the moment of death.
The two periods overlapped chronologically, the judges said, and thus the damages for two types of pain and suffering are duplicative.
