Supreme Court Sides With Drugmaker In Suicide Of Glencoe Lawyer

CHICAGO — The U.S. Supreme Court denied a Glencoe woman's request Tuesday to reconsider an appellate court ruling throwing out a $3 million jury verdict in the death of her husband. Wendy Dolin argued pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline's failure to provide adequate warnings on drug labels contributed to the death of her husband, Stewart Dolin, who died by suicide in 2010 at the age of 57.

Just six days after Mr. Dolin, a partner at the law firm Reed Smith in Chicago, began taking a generic version of GlaxoSmithKline's antidepressant Paxil, he jumped in front of a CTA Blue Line train in downtown Chicago. At the time of his death, the drug's labels included a warning about its association with suicide for people under the age of 24 but did not mention anything about an increased suicide risk for older adults.

Ms. Dolin first filed the lawsuit in 2012. A trial court judge dismissed a generic drugmaker as a defendant in 2014 but allowed the suit to proceed against GlaxoSmithKline because the London-based company controlled the drug's design and labeling. Attorneys for the international pharmaceutical manufacturer tried to have the suit dismissed, arguing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had repeatedly rejected requests to change the language of the warning label to better reflect risks.

Federal district judges initially rejected the drug company's arguments and allowed the case to go to trial last year. But a panel of the 7th District Court of Appeals ruled in August the case should have been dismissed before ever making it before a jury.

"Given the facts of the case, no reasonable jury could find that the FDA would have approved an adult-suicidality warning for Paxil under the [agency's rules for amending warning labels,] between 2007 and Stewart Dolin's suicide in 2010," wrote Circuit Judge David Hamilton.

Attorneys for Dolin asked in December for the Supreme Court to review the decision. In court filings, they requested that the Supreme Court toss out the 7th Circuit decision and send the case back to address issues of preemption raised in another ruling. In that case, justices allowed claims from hundreds of people taking the osteoporosis drug Fosamax who sued the drugmaker Merck over labels warning of broken bones.

But lawyers for GlaxoSmithKline said sending Dolin's case back to the appeals court would be "an exercise in futility," since there is nothing in the Fosamax case that could "conceivably" lead to a change in the appellate ruling.

"To this day, Paxil's labeling retains the same class-wide language FDA mandated in 2007 — the very language petitioner complains of here," the drugmaker's attorneys said.

Earlier: Drugmaker Ordered To Pay $3 Million Over Lawyer's Suicide