$36.5 MILLION AWARD SETS RECORD:

A jury has awarded $36.5 million to the family of a 6-year-old boy who is blind, brain damaged and suffering from cerebral palsy since he was injured during his delivery via a surrogate mother at Hartford Hospital. The hospital was found 60 percent liable; the attending physician, Dr. Peter J. Doelger, an obstetrician/gynecologist, 40 percent. The judgment may have set a new record for a Connecticut malpractice award. The previous record was a $27 million verdict in 1999 against Yale-New Haven Hospital and Yale University. A six-member jury in Waterbury Superior Court reached the verdict in the case of Nicholas Cowles, born Feb. 10, 1999. “If the evidence had shown that Hartford Hospital and Dr. Doelger were not at fault, we would have gone that way. We just didn’t see anything that showed us remotely that they weren’t liable,” jury foreman Julie Torres said. The jurors found Doelger failed to interpret strips from a monitoring device that indicated the fetus was in distress, court records show. The difficult delivery continued so long, the fetus suffered from a dangerous increase in blood acidity; the child should have been delivered by Caesarean section long before it was, the jurors concluded.