Seven years is a long time to wait for a courtroom to say what a family has believed all along. Last week, a Kern County jury gave the family of Demi Dominguez that moment. After two days of deliberations, jurors found former Bakersfield OB-GYN Arthur Park negligent in his care of the 23-year-old, who died in April 2019 along with her newborn son, Malakhi.
The jury awarded $9.5 million. The family will see a small fraction of it.
What happened in 2019
According to reporting by KVPR, Dominguez went to Mercy Hospital Southwest in April 2019 complaining of swelling. Park was the on-call OB-GYN assigned to her. She stayed about 23 hours, then went home with a prescription for labetalol, a blood pressure drug. A few days later her fiancé, Xavier De Leon, woke up to find her having a seizure. She died soon after. Doctors delivered Malakhi by emergency C-section, and he died less than a day later.
The cause was preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that begins with high blood pressure and can lead to stroke, seizures and death.
At trial, the plaintiffs’ expert witness, Los Angeles OB-GYN Dr. Michele Milovina, testified that a patient showing signs of preeclampsia should get magnesium through an IV and stay in the hospital, not go home with a pill that takes too long to work. She also told jurors that a blood pressure reading above 160 counts as a medical emergency. Hospital records showed Dominguez had five readings above that line.
That testimony matches published clinical guidance. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists treats a systolic reading of 160 or higher as severe hypertension, which places a patient in the category of preeclampsia with severe features. A summary of ACOG’s guidance by The OBG Project describes magnesium sulfate as “the treatment of choice for seizure prophylaxis.”
Park’s side of the story
Park did not have a lawyer. He represented himself, called no witnesses or experts, and kept his testimony short. KVPR reported that he struggled with courtroom procedure and said much of his evidence had been excluded by the judge.
He told jurors he never spoke with or examined Dominguez when she came in, and that nurses never told him her blood pressure was abnormal. He blamed the high readings on a faulty blood pressure cuff. After the verdict, he said he would have hired an attorney if he could have afforded one, and that he was worried about how he would pay.
The jury’s decision also covered only one doctor. A second physician who treated Dominguez, Dr. Hans Yu, was originally named in the suit but settled the day before trial, and jurors were told to leave him out of their deliberations. Mercy Hospital Southwest was named in the lawsuit as well, but the family’s former lawyer did not include it as a defendant at trial. And a civil negligence finding is not a criminal one. The jury decided Park fell short of the standard of care, not that he meant to cause harm.
Park’s history with regulators has come up throughout coverage of the case. The Medical Board of California accused him of gross negligence and investigated his practice three times, including once after Dominguez died, but did not revoke his license. He voluntarily surrendered it in 2021.
Why $9.5 million becomes $250,000
The gap between what the jury awarded and what the family will collect comes down to a 1975 law. The Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act, known as MICRA, caps non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases. Those are damages for pain, grief and the loss of a loved one, as opposed to economic losses like medical bills or lost wages. An analysis by the actuarial firm Milliman explains that the cap sat at $250,000 per plaintiff, while economic damages have no limit.
The family’s award was entirely non-economic. Their attorney, Patrick Logan of Trial Lawyers for Justice, said they will receive $250,000.
California changed the law in 2022. Assembly Bill 35 raised the cap for wrongful death cases to $500,000, increasing by $50,000 a year for a decade, but only for cases filed on or after Jan. 1, 2023. The Dominguez family filed in 2022. Tracy Dominguez, Demi’s mother, lobbied for AB 35 anyway, knowing it would not help her own case.
The bill was a compromise. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it, he said lawmakers, patient groups and doctors had “reached a consensus that protects patients and the stability of our health care system.” It ended one of the longest political fights in Sacramento, which included a failed 2014 ballot measure and a second one headed for the 2022 ballot before the deal was struck.
Both sides of that fight still have a case to make. Doctors and hospitals have long argued that the cap keeps malpractice insurance affordable and keeps physicians, especially specialists like OB-GYNs, practicing in communities that already struggle to keep them. After voters rejected Proposition 46 in 2014, the California Medical Association said Californians “simply don’t want to increase health care costs and reduce health access” so that trial attorneys could file more lawsuits. A Legislative Analyst’s Office review, cited by Times of San Diego, put malpractice costs at roughly 1% of the state’s health spending and said lifting the cap would likely push spending up, though by an amount that is hard to pin down.
Patient advocates see it differently. Consumer Watchdog, which backed raising the cap, argued that the old limit kept many families from ever reaching trial, because the cost of litigating a case could outweigh what they stood to recover. Its executive director, Carmen Balber, said families were “locked out of the courtroom.”
Preeclampsia in the Valley
Deaths from preeclampsia are considered among the most preventable maternal deaths. A California study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology found a good-to-strong chance of changing the outcome in 60% of preeclampsia-related deaths. The state has made real progress since then. Researchers at UCSF report that California’s preeclampsia deaths dropped 76% between 2014-2016 and 2017-2019, largely because of better diagnosis and treatment guidelines.
That progress hasn’t reached every region equally. Michele Monserratt-Ramos, a Consumer Watchdog advocate who worked with the family for years, told KVPR that the Central Valley has the highest maternal mortality rate in California, and that many families harmed in similar ways never make it as far as the Dominguez and De Leon families did.
Tracy Dominguez said she hopes the case raises awareness about preeclampsia and encourages families with bad experiences to file complaints with the Medical Board of California. Outside the Kern County Superior Court, De Leon thanked people for their support and prayers over the years. “Over the past seven years, it’s felt like a cloud has been over my life,” he said.
The verdict doesn’t change what happened in 2019. What it does is put on the record what a jury concluded about it.
Sources
- Jury awards $9.5 million to Bakersfield family in medical malpractice lawsuit, KVPR
- Preeclampsia guideline summary (ACOG Practice Bulletin 222), The OBG Project
- How will AB 35 affect MICRA and non-economic damage caps, Milliman
- Governor Newsom Signs Legislation to Modernize California’s Medical Malpractice System, Office of the Governor
- Voters resoundingly defeat Proposition 46, California Medical Association
- California lawmakers reach deal to raise medical malpractice awards, Times of San Diego
- Pregnancy-Related Mortality in California: Causes, Characteristics, and Improvement Opportunities, Public Health Institute
- Ending Preventable Pregnancy-Associated Deaths in California, UCSF Institute for Health & Aging
