An Aroostook County jury returned the largest non-death medical malpractice verdict in Maine history after finding Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital missed a critical CT finding and did not follow its own reporting policy. The rule the hospital wrote became the plaintiff's best exhibit.
On June 18, 2026, twelve jurors in Aroostook County, Maine, found that Robert Giordano had carried a bomb in his spine for six weeks while the people paid to watch for it failed to catch it. They set the number at $23.1 million, the largest non-death medical malpractice verdict in the state's history. The bomb was the trial's own frame. According to Berman & Simmons, the plaintiff's firm, the jury heard the case described this way: "As the patient developed progressive neurologic deficits over the next six weeks, people were unaware that he had this ticking time bomb in his spine," the firm says in its release announcing the verdict. "It then detonated on Jan. 30, with him becoming fully and permanently paralyzed."
Giordano is 40. He lives in Madawaska, a mill town at the top of the state, hard on the Canadian line. He fell. He went to the emergency room at Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital. A CT scan was taken. The scan showed a large bony mass pressing into his spinal canal. The plaintiff's case was that the radiologist read the study and never flagged the finding.
That is the fact the defense could not bury. The threat was on the film. The hospital's own rules said a finding like that gets reported, fast, to someone who can act on it. The jury found those rules were not followed.
So the threat sat there and grew. Giordano got worse by degrees. His legs began to fail him. On January 29, the plaintiff's case held, a primary care provider waved the symptoms off as a man chasing pain medicine, and an orthopedic specialist who saw him the same stretch did not see an emergency. The next morning the cord gave out. He has no function from the chest down. No bladder. No bowel. No path back.
Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.
Travis M. Brennan of Berman & Simmons tried the case for Giordano. He did not lead with the missed read alone. He led with the policy. "Northern Light first missed a dangerous finding on Robert's imaging study and failed to follow its own internal policies on reporting this critical finding," Brennan said. That is the line that turns a defensible miss into a record award. A radiologist can miss. Juries forgive a hard read. They do not forgive an institution that wrote a safety rule and then, on the jury's finding, did not follow it.
That distinction is the whole story for anyone who reserves a hospital file. A single missed scan is a coverage question. A documented critical-finding policy the jury found the hospital did not run is a different animal. It is notice. The loss was already building before the claim existed on paper, before the suit, before the day in Aroostook County Superior Court when the verdict came in. The exposure was set the hour the scan was read.
The number lands where the story does. $23.1 million is a Maine record for a living plaintiff. Northern Light Health is one of the largest health systems in the state, and the loss runs through its professional liability program. This is not the biggest verdict in the country this year. It is the cleanest one in the window. A named institution. A named plaintiff. A named scan. A written rule the jury found the institution did not keep. Every piece of it is on the record, and none of it depends on a sympathetic jury reading a hard case kindly.
The pattern repeats because institutions keep building it. A health system writes the rule that would have caught the harm. The system does not run the rule. The rule it wrote becomes the plaintiff's best exhibit. Northern Light now sits in the same file as every defendant undone by its own paperwork. The Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine governs the clinicians who touched the case. The policy that failed governed the building they worked in, and the building is what the jury charged.
The verdict is not the last word. Post-trial motions and the appeal window opened the day the jury read the figure, June 18. Northern Light can move to cut the award or move to try the case again. In a statement after the verdict, the health system said it was "deeply sympathetic" to Giordano and his wife but "disagree[s] with the jury's verdict in this case and in particular the magnitude of this award." None of it moves the facts that built the loss. The mass was on the scan. The rule was on the books. The jury found the hospital read one and broke the other, and a man who walked into its emergency room will not walk out of the chair he leaves in. The film does not lie. The rule does not bend. The man does not stand back up.
The Executive Briefing is six questions. It shows you exactly where the gaps are.
Take the Executive Briefing →Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.