If Aaron Levine had a trophy case, abortionist Robert Sherman would be prominently displayed.
Dr. Sherman once had a thriving business at what he described as his "family planning clinic" in Northwest DC. He sometimes operated on patients while eating a sandwich or talking on the phone to his stockbroker. One reason Sherman was doing so well financially, says Levine, was that he intentionally performed incomplete abortions so that patients would have to return for a second paid visit.
Sixteen-year-old Rita McDowell came to Sherman's office for an abortion on March 6, 1975. Sherman failed to finish the procedure, and the girl died two days later of blood poisoning.
Levine won a combination verdict and settlement of more than $500,000 from Sherman on behalf of McDowell's family. Feeling that $500,000 wasn't punishment enough, Levine worked with DC prosecutors to develop a criminal case against Sherman. Charged with second-degree murder, Sherman pleaded guilty in 1979 to 25 counts of perjury before a grand jury and a medical board, had his medical license revoked, and went to prison.
Sherman is not actually on display in Levine's 19th Street office, but dozens of pieces of modern art, including, an Andy Warhol, are put there under the supervision of Levine's wife, Barbara, director of prints at the Middendorf Gallery. Levine himself is a past president of the Washington Project for the Arts.
Levine has two primary causes.
One involves DES, or diethylstilbestrol, a drug often given to pregnant women during the 1940s and 1950s to prevent miscarriages; in the early 1970s, the US Food and Drug Administration banned it for pregnant women. Studies have shown that it can cause cancer in the children of women who take it, and birth defects in a subsequent generation.
Levine has handled many DES cases in the Middle Atlantic region. So far, two of the suits against manufacturers of the drug have gone to trial, resulting settlements of about $1 million each just before jurors were to have begun their deliberations. Six other cases have produced large pretrial settlements, including one to a nineteen-year-old woman, whose mother took DES, that could net the daughter as much as $2 million, depending on how long she lives.
He has represented nearly 150 women who have filed suit against the A.H. Robins Company of Richmond, makers of the Dalkon Shield, a birth-control device that has injured thousands of women and generated some 5,000 lawsuits. About a third of his cases against Robins have been settled, and the others are still pending.
Levine had three full-time nurses on his staff to help process the Dalkon Shield claims until Robins declared bankruptcy; he still has one nurse to help with the caseload.
Levine's other leading cases include:
A verdict of more than $1 million against Suburban Hospital of Bethesda on behalf of a fourteen-year-old boy who suffered permanent brain damage after being improperly treated there for a head injury suffered in a junior-high soccer game.
A settlement of $431,000 against a former Georgetown University Hospital obstetrician whose methods during delivery killed the baby and injured the mother so severely that she lost one of her kidneys. To compound the damage, the doctor refused to sign a death certificate for the stillborn baby, delaying burial for more than a year.
Nothing distresses Levine more than incompetent obstetricians and anesthesiologists. "They take a well baby or a well adult, and make them sick."
Source: Washingtonian Magazine, January 1986