Jury awards nearly $20 million for ‘botched’ Mayo surgery
Jeremy Olson | The Minnesota Star Tribune | November 26, 2025
An Olmsted County jury awarded $19.8 million to an Iowa mother who suffered abdominal disfigurement and ongoing pain after a “botched” surgery at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, a law firm announced Wednesday.
Attorneys representing Linette Nelson said the judgment compensates for a string of mistakes at Mayo, which started in 2018 during a complex, three-stage colorectal procedure when Dr. Amy Lightner left diseased tissue inside her patient.
Nelson, a mother of two who lives in Fort Dodge, Iowa, faces a lifetime of medical monitoring and possibly more corrective surgeries as a result of the error, her attorneys said.
“World-class reputations don’t excuse life-altering medical negligence,” said LaMar Jost, one of Nelson’s attorneys at the Hixson & Brown Law Firm in West Des Moines.
The lead surgeon in the case has left Mayo and now practices in California. A statement from a Mayo spokesperson said the health system’s leaders are “disappointed in the verdict. The organization will evaluate next steps while remaining steadfast in its commitment to providing the highest standards of care and patient outcomes.”
The size of the award was unusual but not unprecedented. A Wisconsin jury awarded more than $13 million in 2023 to a woman who suffered a stroke during a cardiac procedure at the Mayo Clinic Health System hospital in Eau Claire.
The record medical malpractice verdict in Minnesota occurred in 2022, when a federal jury awarded $110 million for negligent care by an orthopedic practice in St. Paul to a patient who suffered a soccer injury. A judge later reduced that award to $10 million.
Monday’s verdict followed a nine-day jury trial over the treatment of Nelson, who sought surgery at Mayo because other treatments had failed to address ulcerative colitis — an inflammation that causes pain and digestive problems.
The surgery, in three stages, was supposed to remove diseased sections of Nelson’s intestine and rectum, create a temporary lower digestive tract while she healed, and then finally stitch together the remaining healthy sections of her colon.
Problems emerged when more than 5 centimeters of diseased tissue were left behind during the second procedure, and then when Lightner overlooked imaging data about the error and pressed on with the third procedure, court records show.
Another doctor had to redo the entire surgery, which was complicated by the damage from the first attempt, according to Nelson’s attorneys.
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