Background
In May 2019, April S. Clark underwent surgery to remove an ovarian cyst, during which her bowel was perforated. She died on June 27, 2019 while under the post-operative care of Dr. Thomas Leigh, Dr. William Shirley, and their practice, OB/GYN Specialists, LLP. Her husband, Charles Clark, and her daughter, April D. Clark (as estate administrator), brought wrongful death and survival claims against the treating physicians.
At a July 2024 jury trial in Bibb County State Court, the jury returned a verdict for the plaintiffs: $29,250,000 for the full value of Clark’s life, $2,500,000 for conscious pain and suffering, and $1,715,176 for medical expenses. The defendant physicians moved post-trial to remit the wrongful death award under OCGA § 51-13-1(b), Georgia’s noneconomic damages cap for medical malpractice actions, which limits recovery to $350,000. The trial court granted the motion, slashing the $29.25 million wrongful death award to $350,000. The Clarks appealed; the defendants cross-appealed.
The central legal question was whether Georgia’s noneconomic damages cap — already held unconstitutional as applied to pain and suffering and loss-of-consortium damages in medical malpractice cases by Atlanta Oculoplastic Surgery, P.C. v. Nestlehutt, 286 Ga. 731 (2010) — could nonetheless be applied to reduce the wrongful death award for the “full value of life.”
The Court’s Holding
Chief Justice Peterson, writing for the court, first held that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in allowing the defendants to raise the cap for the first time in post-trial motions. Because OCGA § 51-13-1(b) is not an affirmative defense subject to waiver — it is a statutory ceiling on recovery that is automatically triggered once a verdict exceeds the cap amount — mere silence in the pretrial order did not forfeit the right to invoke it. The court distinguished its prior decision in Ga. Dep’t of Human Resources v. Phillips, where parties had expressly agreed in the pretrial order that a specific cap would apply.
The court then declined the defendants’ invitation to overrule Nestlehutt, applying its stare decisis framework and concluding that history and precedent provide sufficient support for Nestlehutt’s holding that Georgia’s constitutional right to jury trial is substantive — protecting the right to have a jury determine the full measure of damages as recognized at common law in 1798 — not merely procedural. Because Nestlehutt was not “obviously and harmfully wrong,” the court reaffirmed it.
Turning to the decisive question, the court resolved the case on statutory construction rather than constitutional grounds. Because Nestlehutt renders the cap inapplicable to pain and suffering damages included in this verdict, applying the cap’s single aggregate limit solely to the wrongful death component would require rewriting the statute — a task reserved to the legislature. The cap statute cannot operate as written in a case where the jury’s verdict necessarily includes damages categories that are constitutionally protected from legislative reduction. Accordingly, the court vacated the trial court’s order granting remittitur and directed reinstatement of the full jury verdict. The case was remanded solely for the trial court to address one remaining new-trial argument it had not previously considered.
Key Takeaways
- Nestlehutt stands: the Georgia Constitution’s right to jury trial bars the legislature from capping pain-and-suffering and loss-of-consortium damages in medical malpractice actions, and the court rejected calls to overrule that 2010 precedent.
- Where a verdict includes both constitutionally protected noneconomic damages (pain and suffering) and contested wrongful death damages, the $350,000 cap in OCGA § 51-13-1(b) cannot be applied to either component without judicially rewriting the statute — a separation-of-powers violation.
- Defendants do not waive the statutory damages cap by omitting it from the pretrial order; it may be raised for the first time in post-trial motions because it is a statutory limit on recovery, not an affirmative defense.
- The decision expressly declines to rule on the constitutional questions specific to wrongful death damages (right to jury trial and equal protection), leaving those issues open for future cases where the statutory-construction escape hatch is unavailable.
Why It Matters
This decision effectively neutralizes OCGA § 51-13-1(b)’s $350,000 cap in any Georgia medical malpractice trial where the jury awards both wrongful death damages and pain-and-suffering damages — the most common fact pattern in fatal malpractice cases. For plaintiffs’ attorneys, it restores potentially tens of millions of dollars in verdicts that had been subject to remittitur. For defense counsel and the healthcare industry, it means the cap provides no practical protection in combined wrongful death and survival-action cases, and the statute now awaits either legislative reform or future constitutional adjudication on the wrongful death component.
The ruling also has immediate statewide significance: the court notes it is deciding companion cases (Cayamcela v. Advocacy Trust, LLC and Hospitalist Services of Georgia, P.C. v. Advocacy Trust, LLC) under the same framework, signaling that the holding sweeps broadly across the docket of pending wrongful death malpractice cases. Insurers, hospitals, and physicians’ groups — several of which filed amicus briefs — will face substantially higher exposure until and unless the General Assembly rewrites the cap statute in a manner that can survive constitutional scrutiny.