Chief justice "fully recovered" but hospitalized after seizure, fall

ROCKPORT, Maine — Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. was rushed to a hospital Monday afternoon after suffering a seizure at his summer island home, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said.

Roberts, 52, fell on a dock after having a "benign idiopathic seizure," said Kathleen Landin Arberg, the court's public information officer. She said that Roberts has "fully recovered from the incident" but that he would remain at Penobscot Bay Medical Center here overnight for observation.

Arberg said the chief justice, who has presided over the court for two terms, suffered minor scrapes in the fall but that a "thorough neurological evaluation ... revealed no cause for concern."

She said he experienced a similar event in 1993 but had no recurrence until Monday.

Seizures are any sudden, abnormal electrical activity in the brain. While some are focused in one part of the brain, others can be generalized. Not all seizures involve convulsions. Arberg's description of a benign idiopathic seizure indicates an episode whose origins are unknown.

Newsweek reported in November 2005 that Roberts had suffered a seizure in January 1993 while golfing. "It was stunning and out of the blue and inexplicable," Larry Robbins, a Justice Department colleague, told the magazine. Robbins said Roberts was not allowed to drive for several months after the seizure.

There is no record of any discussion of the 1993 seizure or of Roberts' health in general during his confirmation hearings. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who chaired the hearings, told CNN on Monday night that senators were told about the previous episode but did not find it serious enough to ask Roberts about. Roberts has no known history of major illness.

Roberts, the youngest member of the Supreme Court, took office as chief justice in September 2005 after being nominated by President Bush to replace the late William Rehnquist.

Roberts' seizure occurred around 2 p.m., Arberg said, when he was stepping off a boat after doing errands near his home on Hupper Island, which is about halfway up the Maine coast.

Roberts was taken by private boat to the mainland and taken by ambulance to the hospital, about 20 miles away, said John Falla, town manager of St. George, which encompasses the island.

St. George Fire Chief Tim Polky told The Associated Press that Roberts was "conscious and alert when they put him in the rescue [vehicle] and took him to Penobscot Bay Medical Center."

The chief justice was admitted by an emergency-room doctor and was examined by Dr. Judd Jensen, a staff neurologist, said Chris Burke, the hospital's director of marketing and communications.

Jensen said Roberts was "aware and alert" when he arrived at the medical center. He declined to say what the chief justice's full neurological evaluation entailed.

Medical opinions differed on what Roberts' seizures mean.

Someone who has had more than one seizure without any other cause is determined to have epilepsy, said Dr. Marc Schlosberg, a neurologist at Washington Hospital Center, who is not involved in Roberts' case.

Whether Roberts will need anti-seizure medications to prevent another is something he and his doctor will have to decide. But after two seizures, the likelihood of another at some point is greater than 60 percent. "When it's going to occur, obviously nobody knows," Schlosberg said.

The Web site of the National Institutes of Health says that "only when a person has had two or more seizures is a person considered to have epilepsy."

Epilepsy is merely a term for a seizure disorder, but it is a loaded term because it makes people think of lots of seizures, cautioned Dr. Edward Mkrdichian, a neurosurgeon at the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch.

Still, Mkrdichian said anyone who has had two otherwise unexplained seizures is at high risk for a third, and that he puts such patients on anti-seizure medications.

"Having two seizures so many years apart without any known culprit is going to be very difficult to figure out," agreed Dr. Max Lee of the Milwaukee Neurological Institute.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.