Jahi McMath was a thirteen-year-old girl who was declared brain dead in California following surgery in 2013. This led to a bioethical debate engendered by her family's rejection of the medicolegal findings of death in the case, and their efforts to maintain her body using mechanical ventilation and other measures. Her parents considered these measures to constitute life support, while her doctors considered this to be futile treatment of a deceased person. In October 2014, the McMath family attorney made the unprecedented request that Jahi McMath's brain death declaration be overturned. The attorney later withdrew this request, saying he wanted time for the court-appointed medical expert and his own medical experts to confer. In March 2015, McMath's family filed a malpractice lawsuit against Children's Hospital Oakland and against the surgeon who performed McMath's surgery, indicating they were prepared to argue as part of the lawsuit that McMath is not dead, but profoundly disabled. The family lawyer stated that a preliminary second death certificate was issued on June 22, 2018, listing extensive bleeding relating to liver failure as the cause of death.
Background
According to court documents, McMath was admitted to Children's Hospital Oakland on December 9, 2013, for an adenotonsillectomy, uvulopalatopharyngoplasty and submucous resection of bilateral inferior turbinates. It was hoped these procedures would provide improved airflow during her sleep at night. The hospital described these procedures as complicated. The family described the surgery as a routine tonsillectomy in media reports.
After the surgeries were performed, McMath was conscious and according to her mother, Latasha "Nailah" Winkfield, asked for a popsicle while in the recovery room. On December 9, 2013, McMath suffered massive blood loss and consequent cardiac arrest. According to McMath's doctors at Children's Hospital Oakland, the loss of blood circulation caused whole brain death. On December 12, 2013, her doctors declared her brain-dead. Her family was informed that she was legally dead, and that as a result, life support systems would be discontinued. Her family refused to accept the medical declaration of death by neurological criteria, said that McMath was not dead, and initiated legal proceedings in an effort to require the hospital to continue treatment.
Legal action
On December 20, 2013, McMath's family filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court, petitioning the court to require Children's Hospital Oakland to keep McMath on life support. In a pretrial conference on December 23, Judge Evelio Grillo appointed Paul Graham Fisher, the chief of Child Neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, to provide an independent medical opinion regarding the declaration of brain death. McMath's family also requested to have Paul A. Byrne conduct a separate evaluation. Byrne, a neonatologist, has campaigned against the medical consensus of accepting brain death as death. The court denied that request.
Fisher examined McMath and affirmed the diagnosis of brain death, reporting that she had no activity on an electroencephalogram, no blood flow to the brain and did not breathe when removed from mechanical ventilation, all of which are standard clinical indications of total brain death.
On December 24, 2013, Judge Grillo ruled that McMath was legally dead, basing his decision on the medical evidence presented by physicians from Children's Hospital Oakland and from independent expert Paul Fisher, but ruled to require the hospital to continue mechanical ventilation until December 30, 2013, later extending this order until January 7, 2014. Grillo told the family "This has been very, very hard on you. No one anywhere would wish this to happen to anyone."