JURY FINDS NO HARM TO BOY.

Jury Finds No Harm to Boy From Wrongful Circumcision. [2011]

 

 

In a blow to supporters of male “genital integrity,” an Indiana jury has ruled that a doctor did not injure a boy by circumcising him when he was an infant even though his mother wanted him to be left intact.

Dr. Michael R. Burt, a Muncie, Ind., pediatrician performed the procedure a day after the boy, now 7, was born in November 2003. He admitted being negligent but a Delaware County Circuit Court jury found he did not commit an intentional battery and awarded the boy no damages on the negligence claim.

The boy, identified only as N.S., and his mother hired David J. Llewellyn, the country's leading wrongful circumcision lawyer, to represent them. He argued that the boy was entitled to $400,000 — or $15 a day over his “natural” life expectancy — for his “sexual loss” and other damages.

“Full justice means full damages,” Llewellyn told jurors in his closing argument, saying his client had “a right to be whole, a right to have a normal penis” and should be compensated for being “permanently deprived of having normal sexual intercourse when he is an adult.”

Anti-circumcision activists — or “intactivists” — claim the procedure reduces sexual sensation. But Edward L. Murphy, an attorney for Burt, said an award of $400,000 in damages to the boy would “open the courthouse door to every kid who's been circumcised.”

“Let's pay [the boy] $15 a day until he dies?” he asked the jury. “That's nonsense!”

Llewellyn, of Johnson & Ward in Atlanta, has now lost two out of three wrongful circumcision trials, his only plaintiff's verdict being for $65,000. “These cases are difficult,” he told On Point, citing a social consensus that still favors circumcision.

The mother of N.S. alleged that Burt was aware of her opposition to circumcision, in part because he was the pediatrician for her “genitally intact” older son. Her family believes “genital integrity is a basic human right,” she said in her lawsuit.

Burt admitted making a mistake but denied injuring the boy. “They can't say [circumcision] is harmful,” defense co-counsel Benjamin D. Ice said. “All they can really say is it's not medically necessary.”

Holding up a photo of the boy, Ice called him “healthy, happy [and] everything you could possibly want a kid to be.”

The plaintiffs were seeking damages for the “tremendous pain” of the procedure, the boy's sexual loss, and his emotional distress. Having a brother who is not circumcised “creates a psychological problem for a child” who is circumcised, Llewellyn says. “That is a heavy burden for a boy to bear.”

Llewellyn admits that N.S. "would not know the difference,” but “we argued that he's suffered a true loss because the foreskin is valuable. The jury evidently did not accept that proposition.” He noted that no one on the jury knew anyone who had been circumcised.

The boy and his mother previously reached a settlement with Ball Memorial Hospital, where the birth and circumcision took place. Llewellyn has won confidential settlements in other wrongful circumcision cases, including that of a man who, upon turning 18, sued an obstetrician for circumcising him when he was an infant.

Jury awards, though, in wrongful circumcision cases do not appear to have exceeded $65,000 — hardly enough, as the authors of a book about circumcision have noted, “To alert hospitals or physicians to the financial liabilities of routine circumcision.”

 

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