CINCINNATI — Dr. Abubakar Atiq Durrani fled Cincinnati for his home country of Pakistan to avoid prosecution in 2013. A decade later, hundreds of his former patients continue to seek resolution after he allegedly performed unnecessary and damaging spinal surgeries on them.
The fugitive doctor was arrested by FBI agents 10 years ago on multiple federal criminal health care fraud charges. Durrani is also accused of billing the federal government and private insurers for those damaging procedures, some of which he performed at West Chester Hospital.
Around the time of his arrest and subsequent flight to Pakistan, hundreds of criminal and civil lawsuits flooded into the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas. Some were initially filed in Butler County.
Other cases were also filed in federal district court.
"I think that this was a very special case that you have so many cases filed against one person," Hamilton County Clerk Pavan Parikh said. "That is not normally something you see."
As the third-largest county in the sixth-largest state in the country, Hamilton County gets upwards of 100,000 case filings each year. That's in large part because the clerk's office is one of a few in Ohio that handles both municipal and common pleas dockets, Parikh said.
Large caseloads are expected, but Parikh said having the same defendant at the center of so many is more than uncommon.
Since 2013, the county's civil filings against Durrani have added up to 507, and 378 of those cases are still active. One new case was even filed this year.
With more than 3,000 active common pleas civil cases in all, that means lawsuits involving the fugitive doctor make up for just over 12% of the entire current civil docket.
"Our system doesn't show when something is still pending an appeal or is going through the appellate process so that number might actually be higher," Parikh said.
With so many cases, Durrani's former patients wait years to see theirs go to trial.
"The numbers are staggering," said Alan Statman, a Cincinnati attorney who started representing patients in 2017 and has been doing so continuously to this day.
In six years he said he and his legal partner have tried 97 cases.
"You don't very often have physicians that have caused this many filings with this many upset patients about the results of their treatment," he said. "I'd say it's at a level of being unprecedented."
They're approaching nearly 30 trials for the year, Statman said.
He and Ben Maraan just wrapped up an eight-day jury trial Tuesday. Three former patients' cases were tried together, as has become customary for Durrani civil cases in an effort to expedite their judicial processes.
But filed in 2017, all three cases took six years to receive a jury verdict. For Statman, that's years too many for some of Durrani's former patients.
Dozens died before they ever got their own resolution, he said.
"It might be (more than 70 people) waiting for their trial, and their opportunity to get their day in court to see how a jury feels about how they were treated, and they pass away before that even happens," Statman said.
Parikh said the courts are working to move the cases as quickly and fairly as possible but other factors inevitably slow the process down.
Criminal cases are always prioritized over civil because of constitutional concerns about a speedy trial and the rights of the accused.
"What ends up happening is a lot of civil cases, for no fault of their own, end up being put on the back burner because you have a requirement to get a certain number of criminal cases done in a certain period of time," he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic created an extra issue, Parikh said, because it halted jury trials for a year.
"There was a very big bottleneck because of the court trying to react to what was happening in the world," he said. "And even when a second wave of COVID came through in early 2022 we would have to suspend jury trials at that period of time."
A potential resolution is the Court of Common Pleas' revamping of its Visiting Judge Program, Parikh said. Visiting Judges are assigned by the Ohio Supreme Court for a specific term of court, a specific period of time or a specific case(s).
A retired Columbus-based judge has been called down to preside over many active Durrani civil cases.
Statman and Maraan are preparing for their next jury trial on another set of Durrani cases. It's slated to begin on Dec. 4.
"(I don't see an end in sight). We're at 97 and there's nothing that would indicate that it's going to slow down." said Statman. "We just keep soldiering on."
