A Chicago area family has won a jury award of $1.3 million in the case of a botched newborn circumcision.
Below are two news stories on the award.
Steven Svoboda
Attorneys for the Rights of the Child
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Jury awards $1.3M for newborn’s botched circumcision: attorneys
Sun-Times Media May 29, 2013
A baby who suffered a partial amputation of his penis during a botched circumcision performed when he was 12 hours old has been awarded a judgment of more than $1.3 million, according to attorneys for the child’s family.
The verdict was returned to the family of the boy, now 5, by a Cook County jury on Tuesday, according to a statement from the family’s attorneys.
Defendant Marc S. Feldstein, M.D., delivered Daniel Burden on Oct. 4, 2007, at Northwestern Memorial’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, the
statement said. The following morning, during a circumcision procedure, a portion of the distal tip of the boy’s penis was inadvertently amputated, according to the statement from the attorneys.
The child was rushed to Children’s Memorial Hospital, where a pediatric urologist successfully re-attached it. Though he will be left with moderate scarring and is at risk for altered nerve sensation in the affected area, his penis should be fully functional, the statement said.
The trial began May 16 and ended Tuesday with the jury awarding the family $1,357,901.12, according to the statement.
“I’m sure that [the boy]will be grateful that this injury was not as devastating as it could have been,” attorney Timothy Tomasik of Tomasik Kotin Kasserman said in the statement. “But he will always be different, and that is something he has to live with for the rest of his life.”
Northwestern didn’t immediately comment on the case.
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North Shore Family Awarded $1.3 Million For Botched Circumcision Of Newborn
May 29, 2013
CHICAGO (CBS) — A North Shore family has won a lawsuit against a physician at Northwestern they say botched their son’s circumcision.
A jury has awarded more than $1.3 million to a 5-year-old boy and his north suburban family.
The family’s lawyer Dan Kotin says in 2007, when the boy was 12 hours old, a doctor at Northwestern inadvertently amputated the tip of the boy’s penis.
Kotin says the doctor missed at least three safety procedures that should’ve been followed.
And Kotin says the boy”…suffered the amputation of the top 40 percent of the head of his penis.”
The attorney for the doctor says the procedure was performed correctly and what happened was one of the unfortunate complications of a circumcision.
But Kotin says “If that were a known complication to a circumcision procedure, I suggest to you that nobody would dare have a circumcision done because it would be too risky.”