The Metropolitan News-Enterprise covered the latest update in a case against the former director of St. Vincent Medical Center’s liver transplant program, reporting that a court of appeal agreed with Dr. Richard Lopez Jr., who is represented by Manatt, that he was entitled to a defense by the hospital’s insurer.
The court sided with Manatt, noting that a state statute precluding insurers from defending certain criminal cases and civil actions brought by public prosecutors does not apply to federal prosecutions. The panel also said that the policy in question required Mt. Hawley Insurance Company to provide a defense under the alleged facts of Lopez’s case.
Lopez had been charged with multiple federal felonies as a result of an alleged plot to transplant a liver into the wrong patient, but he was acquitted by a U.S. District Court jury in October 2011, less than four months after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled that Insurance Code Sec. 533.5(b) barred Mt. Hawley from defending him under the terms of its policy insuring Daughters of Charity Health Systems, Inc., the owner of St. Vincent’s.
The Manatt team included partners Kenneth Julian and Benjamin Shatz.
Read the article here.