Opinion ID: 3163349
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: District Court Proceedings and Jury Trial

Text: On December 17, 2007, the Bradleys filed a complaint against Dr. Sugarbaker in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. A second amended complaint was filed on June 27, 2011, alleging claims based on medical negligence, Dr. Sugarbaker's failure to obtain informed consent, and battery. The second amended complaint asserted, among other things, that Dr. Sugarbaker negligently performed a major surgery to acquire tissue to submit to pathology when . . . obtaining tissue should and could have been done by less intrusive means, including a fine needle aspirated biopsy. The Bradleys alleged that Mrs. Bradley did not have enough information to ma[k]e an informed choice [as to] whether to undergo less intrusive methods for obtaining biopsy tissue than an open surgical biopsy. The Bradleys also claimed that Mrs. Bradley neither consented to nor was informed that [Dr. Sugarbaker] intended to take tissue of any significant size and, as a result, the wedge resection constituted battery. Following discovery, Dr. Sugarbaker filed a motion for summary judgment as to all of the Bradleys' claims. The district court denied the motion as to the informed consent claims, -6- explaining that there are material facts in dispute about what Dr. Sugarbaker told Barbara Bradley about her alternatives and the associated risks. Summary judgment was granted as to the medical battery claim because, according to the district court, the common-law tort of battery is based on the absence of consent to a particular treatment rather than the lack of informed consent. So long as Mrs. Bradley consented to surgery, whatever the dispute about its parameters, the district court reasoned, her battery claim must fail. The case proceeded to trial in February 2014. As described in more detail below, Dr. Sugarbaker filed a motion in limine seeking to exclude testimony from the Bradleys' expert witness, Dr. Joe Putnam, which the district court judge allowed in part. At the end of the trial, the jury returned a verdict for Dr. Sugarbaker. The jury found that Mrs. Bradley was not provided sufficient information to make an informed judgment as to whether to consent to the procedure, but that she failed to prove that neither she nor a reasonable person in her situation would have consented to the surgery had the material information been provided.