Indiana Supreme Court Says “Summary Judgment Is Not Summary Trial,” Remanding State Prisoner’s Malpractice Claim to a Jury
On January 24, 2024, the Indiana Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling and remanded the medical malpractice complaint of state prisoner Edward Zaragoza against Wexford of Indiana LLC, the privately contracted medical provider for the state Department of Corrections (DOC).
Zaragoza was a confidential informant with the Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office when he shot and killed Kory Rogers during a 2010 robbery attempt at the drug dealer’s house. Convicted of murder, Zaragoza began a 120-year term with DOC in 2012. See: Zaragoza v. State, Ind. Super. (Tippecanoe Cty.), Case No. 79D01-1101.
That same year he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and put on Synthroid medication, though the dosage was later reduced. He began experiencing symptoms related to his disease in 2015. But “[b]eyond these background facts,” as the Court later recalled, “the opposing parties dispute almost every point concerning Zaragoza’s condition and treatment.”
Wexford doctors argued that Zaragoza’s condition couldn’t be but so bad if he reduced his medication dosage. Zaragoza’s expert countered that he had an allergic reaction to Synthroid, yet Wexford personnel continued to push it on him. Zaragoza filed suit pro se in state Superior Court in 2019, accusing them of malpractice. The trial court granted Defendants summary judgment, and the Court of Appeals affirmed.
But the Supreme Court reversed those decisions. Quoting Hughley v. State, 15 N.E.3d 1000 (Ind. 2014), the Court said that cases “hinging on disputed material facts” are “‘a matter for trial, not summary judgment.’” Zaragoza’s expert presented triable fact issues in his affidavit, the Court said, so summary judgment was inappropriate on the prisoner’s medical malpractice claims. On a companion Eighth Amendment claim for deliberate indifference to his serious medical need, there was also “some evidence that each doctor knowingly failed to offer him a potentially safer alternative medication for treatment of his condition,” the Court continued, reversing summary judgment on those claims, too.
The Court found a similar set of circumstances in Berry v. Peterman, 604 F.3d 435 (7th Cir. 2010), a case involving a prisoner whose toothache was treated only with over-the-counter pain relievers. Finding it “hard to imagine” that the prison doctor in that case would have done so if “seeing a civilian patient,” the Seventh Circuit ruled that a jury could decide she “knowingly adhered to an easier method to treat Berry’s pain that she knew was not effective.”
The same might happen in Zaragoza’s case, the Court said. Warning that “[s]ummary judgment is not a summary trial,” it remanded the case for a jury to decide the issues that Zaragoza raised. Before the Court, he was represented by Lafayette attorney Brian A. Karle of Ball Eggleston, PC. See: Zaragoza v. Wexford of Ind., LLC, 225 N.E.3d 146 (Ind. 2024).
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