JOHN RITTER - DOCTORS CLEARED OF NEGLIGENCE OVER JOHN RITTER'S DEATH

DOCTORS CLEARED OF NEGLIGENCE OVER JOHN RITTER'S DEATH

A jury has cleared two US doctors of negligence over John Ritter's death, after the comic died of a heart attack in 2003.

The Emmy-award winning actor's wife brought the $67 million wrongful death lawsuit, claiming Ritter would still be alive had he been correctly diagnosed and treated.

Ritter, 54, died in a hospital in September 2003 after suffering a torn aorta while taping the ABC-TV comedy 8 Simple Rules... for Dating My Teenage Daughter.

Lawyers for the doctors had argued that Ritter had a very rare condition that would have been fatal whatever treatment he had been given.

Dr Joseph Lee, the emergency room physician who treated Ritter at Providence St Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, did not realize the actor was suffering from a rare aortic dissection - a tear in the inner layer of a large blood vessel near the heart.

Another physician, Dr Matthew Lotysch, who had examined Ritter two years before his death, was also cleared of negligence.

Ritter's widow, actress Amy Yasbeck, has already received more than $14 million from other medical defendants and has set up a foundation in Ritter's memory to spread awareness of the rare condition.

"So many people have reported to me that they go into an emergency room with chest pains and say, 'I'm not going out of here until you check me for that John Ritter thing.' It has saved their lives," Ms Yasbeck said after the trial. "It's in the front of their minds now."

Ritter starred in hit 1970s sitcom "Three's Company," for which he won an Emmy.