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Holly v. Huntsville Hospital9/16/2005
The plaintiffs below, Shelia Holly and Leroy Holly, appeal from the trial court's order granting a motion for a new trial filed by the defendants below, Huntsville Hospital and Dr. John Edwards Markushewski. We affirm.
I. Facts and Procedural History
On October 6, 1997, Shelia Holly took the Hollys' 11-month-old child, Cameron, to the emergency room at Huntsville Hospital; the child had a fever and a high pulse rate and he was having trouble breathing. Dr. Markushewski observed Cameron for three hours, wrote a prescription for him, and discharged him. Shortly after he was discharged, Cameron went into respiratory arrest and then cardiac arrest. He was transported back to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The Hollys sued Dr. Markushewski and the hospital in the Madison Circuit Court. The jury returned a verdict for the defendants, and the Hollys appealed. This Court reversed the judgment entered on the jury's verdict because the trial court had improperly excluded the testimony of the Hollys' expert witness regarding the applicable standard of care. Holly v. Huntsville Hosp., 865 So. 2d 1177 (Ala. 2003). After another trial, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the Hollys. The defendants filed a motion for a new trial, which the trial court granted, and the Hollys appealed.
On appeal, the dispositive issue is whether the trial court acted within its discretion in granting the defendants' motion for a new trial based on their argument that one of the jurors failed to answer a question on voir dire. The question dealt with whether any of the prospective jurors had had any disputes with Huntsville Hospital and was posed as follows:
"Anybody else that has had any difficulty where you were not satisfied with the service there at Huntsville Hospital? I think I'll just ask a broad question, how about any of you that have had family members that were treated at Huntsville Hospital as in-patients or as out-patients in the emergency department, any of you that have had anything other than a completely satisfactory experience or you know of some family member who has not had that completely satisfactory experience? Now we're excluding the food, okay. How about it? Anybody? Have any of you ever had a dispute with Huntsville Hospital about anything, a bill, a statement or anything about it? You had any dispute with them about anything?"
(Emphasis added.) One of the jurors who did not respond to defense counsel's inquiry had been involved in what the defendants now describe as numerous "collection disputes" with Huntsville Hospital. At the hearing on the defendants' motion for a new trial, the director of patient accounting for Huntsville Hospital testified that, at the time of the trial, the juror had at least 10 delinquent accounts with Huntsville Hospital, totaling $1,268.51, and that the hospital, through various collection agencies, had sent a total of 39 letters and placed 13 telephone calls to the juror regarding his debts to Huntsville Hospital. On May 4, 2004, Huntsville Hospital sued the juror in the Madison District Court, seeking payment on seven of the juror's past-due accounts, although the juror did not receive notice of the filing of that action until at least May 12, the day the jury returned its verdict in favor of the Hollys in their medical-malpractice case against Huntsville Hospital and Dr. Markushewski.
II. Standard of Review
"While we agree ... that a juror's silence during voir dire could be a basis for granting a new trial, we must stress that the initial decision on this issue is within the trial court's sound discretion. Hayes v. Boykin, 271 Ala. 588, 126 So. 2d 91 (1960). Further, t
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