ATLANTA (Legal Newsline) - The adult daughter of a man who died after medical treatment can sue his doctor for wrongful death if the man’s widow refuses to do so, Georgia’s highest court ruled, overturning appellate decisions that restricted the right to sue in such cases to minor children.
Diane Dickens Hamon sued Dr. William Clark Connell and South Georgia Emergency Medicine Associates over the 2018 death of her father, James Dickens. The defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing Dickens’ surviving spouse had refused to sue and the wrongful-death statute didn’t allow his daughter to pursue the case instead. Dickens was married to Lisa Dickens at the time of his death, but the two had long been separated.
The trial court denied the motion to dismiss, but the Georgia Court of Appeals reversed. The plaintiffs had argued the Georgia Supreme Court authorized courts to use their equitable powers to substitute children as wrongful death claimants when a spouse refused or was unable to sue, but the appeals court refused to extend the privilege to adult children.
The Georgia Supreme Court reversed the decision against Hamon and overruled the subsequent appeals court decision as well, in a unanimous Feb. 7 opinion. In it, the court observed that nothing in the wrongful death statute explicitly ruled out adult children suing if a spouse refused. Courts previously used their equitable powers to allow minor children to sue in those circumstances, the court observed, as well as when the surviving spouse was at fault.
“There is nothing in the language of those cases or the equity statutes themselves to suggest that only minor children may benefit from the equitable principles at issue here,” the court ruled. It also overruled Northeast Georgia Medical Center v. Metcalf, a 2022 decision by the same appeals court dismissing a wrongful death lawsuit by two adult children.