SHREVEPORT, La. (Legal Newsline) - A father whose daughter died of sickle-cell anemia at age 20 can’t sue the state of Louisiana for medical malpractice because he failed to establish paternity within a year of her death, an appeals court ruled.
Emanuel Flintroy sued the Louisiana Health Center and several doctors after his daughter, Jessica Wright, entered the hospital with acute sickle crisis in 2008 and was administered narcotics to control her pain but coded and died. Flintroy accused the doctors of causing a fatal drug overdose.
Flintroy never married Wright’s mother but in a deposition she testified he “acknowledged” fatherhood. Flintroy filed a request before Louisiana’s Medical Review Panel within a year of her death on July 31, 2009 but didn’t file his malpractice suit in district court until November 2011.
Louisiana argued for dismissal, since state law requires plaintiffs in wrongful-death cases to establish paternity within a year of their child’s death. Flintroy’s lawyer argued the time limit should have been waived since he filed his administrative action claiming fatherhood within a year.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeal, in a March 3 decision, upheld the trial court’s decision. District courts have jurisdiction to decide all civil matters, including claims of paternity, the appeals court ruled. But administrative agencies have limited jurisdiction and the filing of a medical review request doesn’t overrule the peremptive rules under state law, which require plaintiffs to seek a judicial determination of paternity within a year of death.
“After one year from the child’s death, the putative father no longer enjoys the status of a person entitled to assert the child’s rights,” Judge Milton Moore wrote.