Hearing an appeal of a multimillion-dollar verdict, Maryland’s highest court last week considered if a trial judge engaged in “mischief” or correctly read the statute in ruling that the state’s cap on medical-malpractice awards for pain and suffering applies only to lawsuits first submitted to voluntary arbitration.
James L. Shea, representing a dermatology practice found liable in a Bethesda lawyer’s death, called the lower court’s ruling “totally at odds” with the General Assembly’s intent in passing the 2004 law. The legislature intended that the new cap limit doctors’ legal exposure and insurance premiums, thereby keeping health care costs down, Shea told the Court of Appeals.
But attorney Patrick A. Malone, representing the dead man’s family, said Montgomery County Circuit Judge John W. Debelius III’s ruling tracked the words of the 2004 Maryland Patient’s Access to Quality Health Care Act.
During Thursday’s session, Court of Appeals judges seemed to see merit in both lawyers’ arguments. Several judges said the legislature presumably intended the cap to apply to all malpractice cases but that the actual text of the law could indicate a more limited application.
When legislative intent conflicts with statutory language, courts should favor the law’s words, said Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr.
“The question is not did they intend to do it, but did they do it,” Murphy said.
Shea, urging the court to focus on intent, said the General Assembly’s debates leading to the cap statute included “not one whisper” about exempting cases that have not been arbitrated.
Debelius engaged in “mischief reading” of the law to find that exception, said Shea, of Venable LLP in Baltimore.
But Malone said the law clearly delineates between cases that go first to arbitration, in which the cap applies, and those that go directly to trial, which are not subject to the cap. When the law is clear, judges should not try to determine the legislature’s intent, he added.
“The legislature knows how to write statutes,” said Malone, of Patrick Malone & Associates PC in Washington, D.C.
The high court did not indicate when it will decide the case, Norman A. Lockshin, M.D., P.A. v. Semsker, No. 78, September Term 2009.
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