On June 24, 2025, the Supreme Court of Georgia vacated the Georgia Court of Appeals’ decision refusing to apply Georgia’s $350,000 damages cap to reduce a $7.2 million award of wrongful death damages in a medical malpractice action. AGG Healthcare attorneys Jason Bring, Jerad Rissler, and Lisa Churvis submitted an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief to the court on behalf of the Georgia Hospital Association (“GHA”) and the Medical Association of Georgia (“MAG”), two of the state’s largest healthcare associations.
In 2005, the Georgia General Assembly became concerned with the deleterious effects of rampant litigation and runaway verdicts. It therefore placed a $350,000 cap on the noneconomic damages that could be recovered through medical malpractice injury and wrongful death claims. Five years later in Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery, P.C. v. Nestlehutt (“Nestlehutt”), 286 Ga. 731 (2010), the Supreme Court of Georgia struck down a portion of that statute as unconstitutionally infringing on the right to a jury trial for common law negligence claims for pain and suffering and loss of consortium.
The Supreme Court of Georgia’s decision in Nestlehutt involved complications from a cosmetic facial surgery, not wrongful death. So, the viability of the statutory caps as to wrongful death claims and damages has remained an open question since Nestlehutt. Last year, that question was directly presented to the Georgia Court of Appeals in The Medical Center of Central Georgia, Inc. v. Turner (“Turner”), 372 Ga. App. 644 (2024), on appeal of a trial court’s interpretation of Nestlehutt as prohibiting application of the $350,000 statutory cap to reduce a $7,216,500 wrongful death award. Relying on certain broad statements within Nestlehutt, the Court of Appeals agreed with the lower court’s conclusion that Nestlehutt had struck down the statutory cap as applied to wrongful death claims and damages — even though Nestlehutt did not involve such claims.
On appeal, the Supreme Court of Georgia acknowledged that “Nestlehutt used broad and, at times, imprecise language when discussing the interplay between the constitutional right to trial by jury and the statutory caps,” but it concluded that “the language relied upon by the lower courts was not a holding that controls the outcome of this case.” The claims and remedies at issue in Nestlehutt were available at common law, unlike the statutorily created wrongful death theory of recovery at issue in Turner. The Supreme Court of Georgia explained that the analytical framework it set out and applied in Nestlehutt — that is, the reasoning and principles that were necessary to that decision — was claim and remedy specific. Therefore, because the question of whether the statutory caps can be constitutionally applied to wrongful death claims (and their associated “full value of the life” damages) was not at issue in Nestlehutt, the Nestlehutt court could not (and did not) decide the issue presented in Turner. The Supreme Court of Georgia held that the lower courts erred in concluding otherwise, and directed the case to be returned to the trial court so that it might apply the appropriate analytical framework in the first instance. In a concurring opinion, Justice Colvin called upon the court to reexamine whether Nestlehutt was correctly decided.
The Supreme Court of Georgia decision represents a hard-won step toward potential restoration of legislative power to create a cause of action and its remedy. The damages caps were intended to address the General Assembly’s determination that a crisis existed in the medical liability insurance market, making it difficult for healthcare providers to buy affordable liability insurance. Given the link between hefty verdicts and rising healthcare costs, a restoration of the damages caps may promote predictability and improvement in the provision of quality healthcare services and the resolution of healthcare liability claims.
The Supreme Court of Georgia’s opinion, The Medical Center of Central Georgia, Inc. v. Turner, [Ms. S25G0132, June 24, 2025] __ Ga. __ (2025), is available here. For more information, please contact Jason, Jerad, or Lisa.
