ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) – Property owners in troubled Georgia neighborhoods got some good news from the state Supreme Court recently when it ruled they couldn’t be held liable for gang violence.
Chief Justice Harold Melton wrote the court’s June 21 opinion in the case of a man who was shot and seriously injured at his apartment building then sued under the Georgia Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act.
Plaintiff Manuel Hernandez asserted that law allowed him to pursue triple the compensatory damages he would be owed, plus punitive damages, against the owner of the apartment complex for not ending the gang activity that took place there.
A trial court and the Court of Appeals sided with Hernandez, but the Supreme Court said everybody was reading the statute wrong.
The Gang Act’s subsection (a) says any real property built, maintained, owned leased or used by a gang shall constitute a public nuisance, and an action to abate that nuisance can be brought by local officials like district attorneys.
In subsection (c), it says a person injured by gang activity shall have a cause of action for triple damages. It then says the state, municipalities or aggrieved persons can bring an action to enjoin violations.
“Read as a whole, (the Gang Act) provides different causes of action for different remedies with different plaintiffs and defendants,” Melton wrote. “Subsection (a) says nothing about civil damages. It does not create an ability for any party to pursue an action for damages arising from a public nuisance created by criminal gang activity.
“To the contrary, the subsection speaks only in terms of abatement of a public nuisance.”
The definitions in subsection (c) allow an aggrieved person to seek triple damages only against the orchestrators of gang activity, Melton wrote.
“In this case, however, there is no allegation that Star Residential itself committed, attempted to commit, conspired to commit, or solicited, coerced or intimidated another person to commit any of the criminal gang activity that injured Hernandez,” Melton wrote.
The identities of the shooters of Hernandez remain unknown.