DATELINE :- 23rd August 2000
ACCIDENT AWARD
Paralysed diver wins £21.7m
Keith Rawson, a paralysed scuba diver who suffered decompression illness when he returned to the surface too quickly, has been awarded $31.3m (£21.7m) by a US jury, writes Brian McConnell, London Manager for Anglo-American Law Reports.
After the dive, off Pensacola in north-west Florida, Rawson claimed that doctors at the Baptist Hospital in Pensacola caused his legs to become paralysed by sending him first to the emergency room instead of a hyperbaric chamber.
The doctors argued that their decision saved Rawson's life and that his legs would still have been paralysed even if he had gone into the hyperbaric chamber. The jurors nevertheless handed down the award, a record verdict for Florida's Escambia county.
Rawson fought a five-year legal battle involving two court cases. In 1995, a $7.88m (£5.5m) verdict in his favour was reversed because his attorney made derogatory remarks about the defence experts who gave evidence for the hospital. In 1997, a verdict for the hospital was dismissed because the court was held to have improperly allowed the late addition of evidence from a defence expert.