CNN damages case goes to Florida Supreme Court
TALLAHASSEE — A physician has gone to the Florida Supreme Court in a dispute about whether he should be able to seek punitive damages in a lawsuit against CNN over reports about deaths of children in an open-heart surgery program at a Palm Beach County hospital.
Attorneys for physician Michael Black this week filed a notice that is a first step in asking the Supreme Court to take up the case. A panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal in October said Black, the former head of the pediatric open-heart surgery program at St. Mary's Medical Center, had not met a legal requirement of showing "actual malice" to pursue punitive damages in a defamation lawsuit against CNN and two reporters.
The lawsuit centers on 2015 reports by CNN that said the St. Mary's pediatric open-heart surgery program had a death rate from 2011 to 2013 that was more than three times the national average. The rate was calculated by dividing the number of deaths by the number of surgeries.
St. Mary's and Black disputed the reports because they said CNN's calculation of the death rate was not adjusted to reflect the "risk profile of the patients and the complexity of each surgery," according to the appeals court ruling.
The notice filed this week, as is common, does not detail arguments that Black's attorneys will make at the Supreme Court. But he has alleged that CNN excluded information "from its reporting to support a false claim that the surgical program's mortality figures were 'shocking' or 'alarming,' and to falsely portray him 'as a callous, incompetent, and dishonest surgeon responsible for the preventable deaths of many of his patients,'" according to the appeals court ruling.