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High court throws out lawsuit by officer injured in crash

E-mail|Link|Comments () June 9, 2009 02:29 PM

By Globe Staff

A police officer who was seriously injured in a 2004 car crash while driving to help a pedestrian hit by a car cannot sue the hospital that released the pedestrian after a colonoscopy, the state's highest court ruled today.

Whitman Police Officer Dean Leavitt responded Nov. 1, 2004, to the report of a pedestrian hit. On his way to the scene, his car was hit by another vehicle (which had not been involved in the vehicle-pedestrian crash). It later emerged that the pedestrian was walking home from Brockton Hospital, where he had undergone sedation for a colonoscopy, the Supreme Judicial Court said.

Leavitt alleged that the hospital and two of its nurses should not have released the man without an escort. But the court said today that "the hospital owed no duty to Leavitt to control or detain the patient."

The court, in a four-page opinion written by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, also said, "Leavitt's injury was not 'caused' by the hospital because it falls outside the scope of foreseeable risk."

The court said it may be a foreseeable risk that a medicated patient driving a car from the hospital would injure somebody. But "a police officer injured in an accident in which the patient is not involved is outside that scope."