Day 3 of Snyder trial: ‘I felt very threatened by Mr. Snyder’

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Sue Kinter was shaking after a June 2018 meeting with Stephen Snyder, the prominent medical malpractice attorney on trial for attempted extortion.

UPDATE: Stephen Snyder found guilty of attempted extortion

After the meeting, two of her colleagues needed cigarettes to calm down, and they went outside to digest what had happened.

Snyder had escalated his threats and changed his tune since a meeting in April, when he demanded $25 million in a settlement for his client, the wife of Jeffrey Sanders, who died after a kidney transplant at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, she testified Friday.

According to Kinter, a senior official at the hospital system’s insurance provider, Snyder said that amount was “not negotiable,” that the medical system was “playing with fire,” and that “essentially the hospital would be destroyed” by a media campaign she considered “inflammatory.”

RELATED: Snyder held in contempt, minutes after closing arguments at federal trial

Kinter saw that demand as “in far excess of what the case was worth.”

In June, Snyder pivoted, saying the Sanders settlement was separate, and that the $25 million demand was for Snyder himself.

He was aggressive and loud, she said, and repeatedly interrupted her, making it “really hard to get a point across.” She was troubled by his demand for a direct payment, rather than for a settlement of which he would receive a percentage.

“We were all just absolutely shocked,” said Kinter, who was beginning to cry. “I felt very threatened by Mr. Snyder at that meeting, personally and professionally.”

“I felt very much like Mr. Snyder was trying to extort money from us,” she testified.

At the post-meeting debrief outside, they decided to seek help from law enforcement. They settled the Sanders case for $5 million and never agreed to the consultancy.

Friday’s testimony also offered more detail about the University of Maryland Medical System transplant program.

Rolf Barth said the UMMS transplant division, which he headed from 2015 to 2020, saw too many people dying on the waitlist for kidney transplants, and prioritized increasing access, especially for older, sicker patients. He said renal failure often results in death within a few years, and that dialysis significantly worsens one’s quality of life. He said kidney failure can be fixed with a transplant.

Barth, who was called to testify by federal prosecutors, echoed comments made by his former colleagues earlier in the trial, who portrayed UMMS as a leader in the field. Snyder is expected to call medical experts to testify that the transplant program at UMMS prioritized profit over safety.

“There are a lot of people who sit on that list for a long time, and a lot of people who die on that list,” he said. “Maryland really led the way.”

“That was kind of our motto: Help more people every year,” he said.

Barth disputed Snyder’s characterization of the care provided to Sanders, in whose case Barth was not directly involved. Sanders consented to receive a kidney with a Kidney Donor Profile Index score of 97 — meaning it had a higher risk of failure — and died months after. Snyder says the hospital system recklessly used kidneys that more responsible hospitals would reject.

He said Snyder was “obsessing” over Sanders’s kidney’s KDPI, while the kidney it was paired with performed in another recipient.

“Our field is the most regulated one in medicine,” Barth testified.

Barth said the KDPI is more subjective than it appears. He said most hospitals use high-KDPI kidneys, and that not using such kidneys means a transplant center isn’t offering enough access.

“The numbers do not necessarily correlate to outcomes,” he said.

Day 6: Former client didn’t want Snyder to flip to ‘their side’ under consultancy

Day 5: Prosecution rests, Snyder tells witness to ‘go back to Fenwick’

Day 4: Snyder struggles to follow rules during cross-examination

Day 2: ‘I don’t want to do it, so don’t make me do it’

RELATED: Trial begins in lawyer Stephen Snyder’s attempted extortion case