On February 27, 2026, a Hancock County jury returned a verdict in favor of 71-year-old Mary Shea, who is represented by medical malpractice Attorney Elizabeth Kayatta. The favorable $750,000 verdict followed three days of witness testimony in a medical malpractice trial against orthopedic surgeon Peter Copithorne, M.D. and Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital.
The case arose out of Dr. Copithorne’s failure to look at any of the X-rays he ordered for Mary at a post-operative appointment in March 2019, causing a 2-month delay in diagnosing the subsidence of her hip replacement. As a result, Mary required a much more invasive corrective surgery to fix the subsidence. Dr. Copithorne then attempted to perform the complex corrective surgery himself, and ended up leaving a large and unstable gap in Mary’s femur that subsequently required additional corrective operations at Maine Medical Center. Mary went through extensive physical therapy to try to restore full function in her right hip, but she was left with residual pain and weakness that kept her from fully resuming the active lifestyle she had hoped to get back to by having her hip replaced.
“This is a really important moment for members of the community to stand up and to say that what happened was not ok,” Attorney Kayatta told the Bangor Daily News following the verdict, “When doctors make medical errors, they need to be held accountable for those errors in a meaningful way.