A Southern Indiana district court judge has granted Bloomington-based Cook Medical a new trial after vacating a February judgment in favor of a woman who claimed a filter made by the company broke apart inside her body.
The Feb. 5 verdict awarded $3 million to Tonya Brand, a Georgia woman who says she removed a piece of her intravenous blood clot filter from her thigh after it had deteriorated inside of her. The jury found the device, also known as the Celect IVC filter, to be defective.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard L. Young wrote in the order, filed Monday, that admission of select evidence that made a connection between Brand’s experience and patient deaths in the first trial “crossed the hurdle from harmless error to prejudicial error.”
“[Brand] did not have overwhelming evidence to show the filter was defective or that a defect in the filter caused her injuries,” Young wrote. “Although there was enough to withstand a sufficiency challenge, a jury could have just as easily found in Cook’s favor.”
Young says he shouldn’t have let Brand’s attorney admit a document into evidence that contained hearsay.
In a statement, Cook said its filters have saved thousands of lives and are critical to patient well-being.
“Physicians and companies like Cook worked together to develop vena cava filters to help patients and reduce the risk of deadly pulmonary embolisms,” a Cook spokesperson wrote in a media release. “Physicians choose to use IVC filters when the benefits of the device outweigh the small risk percentage for patients facing potentially life-threatening blood clots. As the District Court noted in vacating the 2019 verdict, “IVC filters, like all medical devices, have risks associated with their use.”
According to Cook, there have been more than a thousand cases filed against the company related to the filters and no court has concluded that the IVC filters are defectively designed.
Motion For A New Trial In Cook v. Tonya Brand
