A Baltimore jury on Wednesday awarded more than $34 million to 20 restaurant workers who claimed carbon monoxide exposure in a downtown hotel left them with permanent brain damage, leading to personality changes, memory problems and, in some cases, the loss of "conjugal affection."
It's a phenomenal figure, area attorneys said, particularly considering how contested the employees' actual injuries were. And it's likely to be reduced by millions: Maryland law puts a cap on pain-and-suffering damages of $710,000 in cases like this, which is well below the awards some of the plaintiffs received.
Still, plaintiffs' attorney William H "Billy" Murphy, who called a news conferences to announce the award, said "justice was done in the case."
Standing on the courthouse steps Wednesday afternoon, Murphy pulled no punches, characterizing the 2008 gas leak at the Pier 5 Hotel, which sickened employees of a Ruth's Chris Steak House located there, as "the worst carbon monoxide poisoning incident in the history of Baltimore."
His colleague Richard Falcon described the hotel's owner and operator as being like " BP down in the Gulf" because they allegedly disabled a safety device that could have prevented the leak.
The Georgia-based attorneys for the hotel owner, TBOP Pier 5 LLC, and operator, MJ Harbor Hotel LLC, did not return messages seeking comment. They're expected to appeal the verdict, which was handed down after a day of deliberation and a 13-week civil trial in Baltimore Circuit Court.
Ruth's Chris was not a party in the lawsuit and is not responsible, Murphy said.
The leak was discovered Feb. 2, 2008, after firefighters responded to a complaint that restaurant employees were falling ill. About 150 people were evacuated from the restaurant that night, and 17 of them were sent to the hospital for treatment after complaining of dizziness and nausea, according to fire officials.
The Ruth's Chris workers, who ranged in ages from their 20s to 40s, filed their first court complaint against the hotel's owner and its operator roughly three weeks after the incident. An amended version, filed last year, claims that the defendants' negligence and poor equipment maintenance created a dangerous situation that exposed the plaintiffs to "deadly levels of carbon monoxide" over a period of time.
The plaintiffs were supposed to attend the news conference, according to a media advisory, but none showed. And messages left for many of them at numbers listed in public records were unreturned; one plaintiff hung up on a reporter.
Three employees and their wives filed a separate injury counts claiming that the exposure affected their romantic relationships through the "loss of, among other things, each other's society, consortium, and conjugal affection, resulting in great mental pain and anguish."
It was a complicated case to try, outside attorneys said, with 23 defendants who all had to be presented to the jury in some way, through testimony, or psychiatric and medical evaluations that chronicled their damages.
Murphy "can really wow a jury and I'm sure that he used all his skill in this case," said attorney Andrew G. Slutkin, who won a $276-million bank fraud verdict with Murphy in 2002. Slutkin specializes in catastrophic injury cases, and he wasn't involved in this case.
He called Wednesday's award "extraordinary," especially because "there was no death, there was no paralysis."
"Any time you get a verdict like that in a case where causation and damages are so hotly contested, it's a real victory," Slutkin said.
Individual plaintiffs received between $11,000 and $1 million in future medical expenses, and between $26,000 and $1.15 million in future lost wages, according to an award chart posted online by The Maryland Daily Record. Those figures could stand, attorneys said.
But the pain and suffering awards above $710,000 given to 14 plaintiffs will "almost certainly be reduced," Slutkin said. They ranged from a low of $75,000 to a high of $3.75 million.
Maryland law prohibits jurors from being told about the cap on such non-economic damages, in part so they don't adjust other awards to make up for it.