Georgia Wrongful Death Case Law: 30 Court Decisions on the “Full Value of Life”

Georgia’s Wrongful Death Act gives certain survivors a claim when a death is caused by another’s wrongful conduct, and it measures the recovery by what the person who died lost rather than by what the family lost. OCGA § 51-4-2 (a), as the Supreme Court of Georgia quoted it in 2018, provides that a surviving spouse or child “may recover for the homicide of the spouse or parent the full value of the life of the decedent, as shown by the evidence,” and § 51-4-1 (2), as the Court of Appeals quoted it in 2026, defines “homicide” to include “all cases in which the death of a human being results from a crime, from criminal or other negligence, or from property which has been defectively manufactured, whether or not as the result of negligence.” The 30 appellate decisions below show how Georgia courts have measured the full value of a life, decided who may claim it, kept it separate from the estate’s own claim, treated the death of an unborn child and applied the deadlines.

The decisions do not all point one way. By this page’s count, 13 favored the family or the estate on the question appealed, 11 favored the defendant, four were split, and two resolved disputes among relatives over who could claim or share in the recovery. Four of the 13 affirmed jury verdicts; the other nine allowed a claim to go forward or decided a question before trial. Each summary reports what the court decided and links to the opinion in the Caselaw Access Project’s reporter text or in the court’s own PDF as archived by CourtListener.

A Note on Statutes and Later Decisions

House Bill 481, passed in 2019, changed the law on the death of an unborn child; its text is quoted in the section on unborn children below, and the four decisions in that section predate it. The annual summaries of general statutes enacted in 2024, 2025 and 2026, published by the Georgia General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Counsel, list no amendment to OCGA §§ 9-3-33, 9-3-99, 50-21-26, 51-4-1, 51-4-4 or 51-4-5. The 2024 summary lists §§ 19-7-1 and 51-4-2 among the sections revised by Senate Bill 448, which it describes as correcting “typographical, stylistic, capitalization, punctuation, and other errors and omissions” throughout the Code. According to the 2025 summary, House Bill 327 (Act 310), effective July 1, 2025, amended §§ 19-7-1 and 51-4-2 among many other sections and “provides for recovery for children born out of wedlock for the homicide of a parent under certain conditions”; the text of those amendments is not described here. The same summary states that Senate Bill 68 (Act 9), effective April 21, 2025, provides for “limitations relative to evidence of noneconomic damages” and for “recovery of special damages for medical and healthcare expenses in personal injury and wrongful death cases.” Many decisions on this page were decided under earlier versions of these statutes.

Among the decisions below, Hamon v. Connell (No. 14) overruled a 2022 decision limiting the claims of adult children, and Auld v. Forbes (No. 27) overruled a 2011 decision that had applied Georgia’s measure of damages to a death in Florida. Caps on damages in medical malpractice cases are a separate subject and are not covered here.

Measuring the “Full Value of Life”

OCGA § 51-4-1 (1), as the Court of Appeals quoted it in 1996, defines the “full value of the life of the decedent, as shown by the evidence” as “the full value of the life of the decedent without deducting for any of the necessary or personal expenses of the decedent had he lived.” Georgia courts measure that value from the decedent’s point of view and recognize an economic part and an intangible part. The seven decisions below address what the measure includes, what it leaves out, what evidence bears on it and how a jury is instructed.

1. OB-GYN Associates of Albany v. Littleton (1989)

OB-GYN Associates of Albany v. Littleton, 259 Ga. 663, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided December 5, 1989

The Littletons sued over the allegedly negligent delivery of their daughter, who died two days after birth. Besides the wrongful death claim and a claim for the child’s services, Mrs. Littleton sought damages for her own mental suffering and emotional distress; according to her claim, she was in the delivery room, saw and heard the efforts to revive the baby, and later had the baby die in her arms. The trial court granted summary judgment on that count, and the Court of Appeals reversed.

Recovery for wrongful death in Georgia, the Supreme Court held, “is limited to the full value of the life without deduction for necessary or personal expenses of decedent and does not include recovery for mental anguish or emotional distress.” A mother may still claim emotional distress in her own action for a physical injury caused by the malpractice, and the case was remanded to determine whether Mrs. Littleton suffered one. In Lee v. State Farm Mutual Insurance (2000), a case in which a mother and daughter were both injured in a collision and the mother witnessed her daughter’s suffering and death, the Court later said that the Littleton cases would no longer be followed to the extent they required a parent’s emotional distress to “stem from the parent’s own physical injury.”

2. Consolidated Freightways Corp. v. Futrell (1991)

Consolidated Freightways Corp. v. Futrell, 201 Ga. App. 233, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided September 3, 1991

Donnell and Nora Lathon, a married couple, were killed in a crash with a Consolidated Freightways truck, and the suit was brought on behalf of his minor child and her minor children. The jury awarded $1,000,000 for the intangible component of the value of Nora Lathon’s life and $800,000 for Donnell Lathon’s, and the company appealed.

Affirming, the court divided the full value of a life into items “having a proven monetary value, such as lost potential lifetime earnings, income, or services, reduced to present cash value,” and “lost intangible items whose value cannot be precisely quantified, such as a parent’s ‘society, advice, example and counsel.'” Mr. Lathon’s veteran’s disability benefits were admissible as “readily provable income of the decedent which ceased because of his death.” The awards did not shock the conscience, although the evidence of the decedents’ relationships with their children was, in the court’s word, “scant,” and under the facts of that case evidence of the couple’s religious activities was admissible on the intangible value of their lives “from the standpoint of the deceased.”

3. South Fulton Medical Center, Inc. v. Poe (1996)

South Fulton Medical Center, Inc. v. Poe, 224 Ga. App. 107, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided November 21, 1996

The day after their newborn son was discharged, Ernest and Jacqueline Poe brought him to the hospital’s emergency room, reporting that he had turned blue. A triage nurse classified him as “Priority 3,” meaning care within about eight hours, and by her own account told the parents that “the baby was fine right now.” The Poes left within eight minutes, and the baby died several hours later. A jury returned a verdict of $1.85 million against the hospital.

The verdict was affirmed. A consensual patient relationship existed, and the charge on damages was correct because it instructed the jury on “the full value of the infant’s life,” not on the parents’ own losses. “It is established that loss of services may be awarded in a wrongful death action as part of the full value of the deceased’s life,” the court explained, and that value includes “both the economic value of the deceased’s normal life expectancy and the intangible element incapable of exact proof.” Four of the nine judges dissented on whether the hospital owed the infant a duty and caused his death; the dissent did not address the damages charge.

4. Brock v. Wedincamp (2002)

Brock v. Wedincamp, 253 Ga. App. 275, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided January 15, 2002

A 23-year-old mother was killed instantly in a head-on collision, and her three-year-old son, through his guardian ad litem, sued both drivers. The defendants sought to introduce evidence that she had two abortions, placed two children for adoption and missed work while pregnant, along with evidence about her sex life. The trial court allowed the evidence of missed work and ruled that the abortions and adoptions could come in if the plaintiff offered evidence that she was a good mother.

Measured from the decedent’s perspective, the court explained, “the loss to the decedent of her opportunity to raise her son, not the loss to her son of his mother,” is what the jury considers, and her abortions, adoptions and sex life were irrelevant to that value. Admitting them to rebut good-mother testimony would be an abuse of discretion “absent some proof” supporting the trial court’s assumption. The reason she missed work was at most “marginally relevant” and, on the record then before the court, was outweighed by its prejudicial effect, and a physician’s hypothetical testimony about sexual conduct and longevity was “extremely speculative.”

5. Bibbs v. Toyota Motor Corp. (2018)

Bibbs v. Toyota Motor Corp., 304 Ga. 68, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided June 18, 2018

Delia Bibbs suffered a head injury in a 1992 accident that left her in a coma, and through her husband as guardian she sued Toyota over an allegedly defective seatbelt latch and door-locking mechanism. Before the jury returned its verdict, which included $30 million for pain and suffering, the parties had entered a “high-low” settlement, and the release excluded any claim for her wrongful death. She died more than 20 years later without waking, and her husband and children sued for the full value of her life. The federal court hearing that suit asked the Supreme Court of Georgia what effect the earlier settlement had.

Because a wrongful death claim is derivative of the decedent’s own claim, the Court answered, “damages recovered or recoverable in an earlier personal injury lawsuit cannot be recovered again in a wrongful death suit.” On economic damages the Court said Toyota was “almost certainly correct” that nothing was left to recover, but it would not say “as a matter of law that there is no difference in value between living in a permanent coma and not living at all, even from the decedent’s perspective,” and it left that question to the district court. The Court noted that in many cases the rule “will not significantly limit the damages,” and that the statute is punitive “not because it permits double damages.”

6. Geary v. Estate of Tapley (2024)

Geary v. Estate of Tapley, No. A24A0978, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided October 25, 2024

James Tapley, who was 80, died about 30 hours after his bladder was perforated during prostate surgery performed by Dr. Brian Geary. His widow, individually and as executor, alleged that Geary was negligent in failing to perform an imaging study of the perforation and in failing to repair it. A jury awarded $15 million, including $2.5 million for pain and suffering and $12.5 million for wrongful death.

Geary had asked for an instruction that pain and suffering damages require evidence that the decedent “was conscious of his imminent death.” That requirement, the court explained, comes from cases about suffering “prior to instantaneous or near instantaneous death,” and Geary cited no case applying it to a decedent who lived more than 30 hours; the pattern charge given was correct, and a broader argument about consciousness, which Geary had not raised as a distinct objection, did not show the substantial error required for review. The court also upheld a charge that a defendant takes a plaintiff as he finds him, given Tapley’s heart and lung disease, and found no abuse of discretion in the trial court’s refusal to reduce the verdict.

7. Harris v. Grant-Malcolm (2026)

Harris v. Grant-Malcolm, No. A25A2124, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided March 13, 2026

David Malcolm stopped behind a disabled car in a middle lane of Interstate 285 and walked up to it, and a truck driven by Rodney Harris struck him as Harris moved into an adjacent lane. His widow and his estate sued. Before trial, the court barred the defense from arguing that damages should be fair to both parties and removed that sentence from the pattern jury instruction, reasoning that fairness is not part of Georgia’s damages statutes.

“It is a longstanding, accepted principle of Georgia law that a verdict should be reasonable and just to both parties,” the court held, tracing the principle to Supreme Court decisions from 1890 on and finding no conflict with the statutory measure of the full value of the decedent’s life. The rulings were vacated and the case remanded for the trial court to decide whether the principle is substantially covered by the rest of the charge. The court also granted Harris summary judgment on the claim for bad-faith attorney fees: under the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Love v. McKnight, traffic violations alone do not show bad faith, and the widow conceded that Harris did not see Malcolm.

Who May Bring the Claim

The statutes set an order. As the Court of Appeals summarized it in 2026, quoting an earlier decision, “[i]n a typical case, therefore, a spouse has exclusive standing to bring a claim for the wrongful death of the decedent; if the decedent is unmarried, the decedent’s children may recover, followed by the decedent’s parents and (if the decedent has no surviving spouse, children, or parents) his or her estate.” A parent’s claim for the death of a child is governed by OCGA § 19-7-1 (c), and the administrator’s by § 51-4-5 (a). The nine decisions below concern what happens when the person first in line will not or should not sue, and who counts as a child.

8. Brown v. Liberty Oil & Refining Corp. (1991)

Brown v. Liberty Oil & Refining Corp., 261 Ga. 214, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided May 10, 1991

Vicky Brown died in a collision between her car and a truck operated by a Liberty Oil employee. Her minor children sued; according to them, her surviving husband had abandoned them, could not be located and would not pursue the claim in any event. The trial court dismissed their complaint under two 1986 decisions holding that the statute gives the surviving spouse exclusive standing, though, as one of them put it, “The spouse is required to share the proceeds with the children.”

The Supreme Court reversed. “The trial court should have allowed these minors, who have no remedy at law, to maintain an action for the wrongful death of their mother,” it held, relying on the superior court’s equity powers, and it overruled any contrary holding in the two earlier decisions. Three justices concurred only in the judgment; one of them wrote that the remedy was not available to minor children “in all events,” as where a spouse who has maintained the parental relationship decides not to sue.

9. Tolbert v. Maner (1999)

Tolbert v. Maner, 271 Ga. 207, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided June 14, 1999

Rosabell Glover died in 1995, apparently from an allergic reaction to prescribed medication, leaving seven children. An eighth child had died in 1960, and his only son, Tyrone Maner, claimed a share of the wrongful death settlement the seven children obtained. His right to a share of the estate’s separate recovery was not disputed, and the lower courts held that he could share in the wrongful death recovery as well.

Only the spouse and children living when the claim arises may bring it, the Supreme Court held in a unanimous decision: “the statutory right to bring an action for wrongful death enures only to the decedent’s spouse and children who are living at the time the action accrues.” A grandchild takes a share only when his parent was an original claimant and died while the action was pending, and the provision for per stirpes shares “does not, standing alone, expand the scope of permissible plaintiffs.”

10. Belluso v. Tant (2002)

Belluso v. Tant, 258 Ga. App. 453, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided November 19, 2002

Rebecca Belluso Tant, 43, died when the vehicle in which she was a passenger, driven by her husband of less than a year, went out of control. According to a police investigation, he was driving more than 90 miles per hour and had consumed alcohol; he was charged with homicide by vehicle and other offenses, and the record did not show how the charges were resolved. He was also appointed personal representative of her estate. Her father sued him, and the trial court, calling it “a compelling case,” held that the father lacked standing because she left a spouse.

Equity supplies the remedy, the Court of Appeals held in reversing: “it is within the equitable powers of the superior court to permit the prosecution of the wrongful death action by a parent when the surviving spouse is the alleged wrongdoer.” Otherwise the husband “would have to sue himself to recover for his own negligence, a legal impossibility.” Because the father’s right arose under § 19-7-1, the court also rejected the husband’s argument that, as personal representative, he alone could recover funeral and medical expenses under § 51-4-5 (b).

11. Carringer v. Rodgers (2003)

Carringer v. Rodgers, 276 Ga. 359, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided March 24, 2003

David Newton was shot and killed by his wife of less than four months, a police captain, with her service revolver, and she was convicted of felony murder. His mother sued the wife, the police chief and the city in federal court, and the Eleventh Circuit asked the Supreme Court of Georgia whether a parent has a wrongful death claim when the child’s surviving spouse is the killer.

The parent does, the Court answered: she “has standing to bring a cause of action for the wrongful death of the child against the murdering spouse and/or another individual or entity proximately causing the child’s death” and may recover the full value of his life. The legislature did not intend that a murdering spouse “financially benefit from the murder” by controlling the claim, the Court reasoned, and “it cannot be credibly argued that an aging parent losing an adult child is not damaging to the social and economic order.” Two justices dissented, reading the statute’s plain language to bar the claim because Newton left a spouse.

12. Blackmon v. Tenet Healthsystem Spalding, Inc. (2008)

Blackmon v. Tenet Healthsystem Spalding, Inc., 284 Ga. 369, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided September 22, 2008

Joyce Blackmon, legal guardian of her granddaughter because the child’s father was incarcerated, sued a hospital and others in state court for medical malpractice and the wrongful death of the child’s mother. The father had not filed a claim within the two-year limitation period, and the Court of Appeals held that a state court lacks a superior court’s equitable power to let someone other than the surviving spouse bring the claim.

Assuming without deciding that the state court lacked that power, the Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeals should have sent the case to superior court rather than reverse. Georgia courts “have allowed other persons acting in a representative capacity to maintain a wrongful death action on behalf of a minor child where the surviving spouse declines to pursue the claim,” the Court explained, and the Georgia Constitution requires a court to transfer a civil case “in which it determines that jurisdiction or venue lies elsewhere.”

13. deVente v. Flora (2009)

deVente v. Flora, 300 Ga. App. 10, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided September 2, 2009

Byron Trent Pyles, who was not married, died in October 2007 after a crash with a municipal police officer. His daughter was born in March 2008, and DNA testing confirmed his paternity. The child’s maternal grandmother, as guardian ad litem, sought a declaration that the child held the wrongful death claim; Pyles’s parents argued that the child had to be shown to have been “quick” at the time of his death.

The claim belonged to the child, the court held. Looking to the laws of descent and distribution, it treated as a child one conceived before the parent’s death, born within ten months of it and surviving 120 hours, and it declined to require proof of quickening where a living child was “seeking to recover for the death of her father.” The parents’ request for an equitable share failed because the statute “makes a wrongful death action exclusive to the party entitled to bring it.” The court applied § 51-4-2 and the descent statutes as they read in 2009; see the note on House Bill 327 above.

14. Hamon v. Connell (2023)

Hamon v. Connell, 315 Ga. 760, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided February 7, 2023

James Dickens died in February 2018, and his only surviving child, Diane Hamon, an adult, filed a medical malpractice and wrongful death action against a physician and South Georgia Emergency Medicine Associates. Dickens was married but had long been separated from his wife, who, according to the complaint, “refused” to bring the claim. The Court of Appeals held that the equitable exception recognized in Brown applies only to minor children.

“We see no basis in the relevant case law, however, for drawing such a distinction,” the Supreme Court held, noting that the Act permits recovery by children “minor or sui juris” on the same terms. Because the complaint did not show with certainty that Hamon could not proceed under Brown, the trial court correctly denied judgment on the pleadings. The unanimous Court overruled a 2022 Court of Appeals decision that had denied two adult children the claim, and a footnote recorded that “[s]ome of us are skeptical that Brown was rightly decided,” though the Court applied it as precedent.

15. Garner v. Acadia Healthcare Co. (2023)

Garner v. Acadia Healthcare Co., 370 Ga. App. 146, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided October 23, 2023

William Garner was evaluated at a mental health facility in April 2019 and, according to the complaint, had been missing since his discharge. A suit had been filed in his name in 2021; after the probate court appointed his brother conservator of a missing individual’s estate, the brother and the estate were substituted as plaintiffs and added a wrongful death claim, alleging that the facility’s negligence caused Garner’s death. No court had found that Garner was dead.

The dismissal was affirmed for lack of standing. Section 51-4-5 authorizes the administrator or executor of “the decedent,” the court reasoned, and even if the probate code’s presumption of death after four years applied, “this Court cannot create a judicial exception to the statute establishing who may bring a wrongful death action.” The other claims fell with it because each was tied to Garner’s death. One judge dissented, finding the complaint’s allegation that Garner was dead sufficient at the pleading stage.

16. Keais v. Kelley (2026)

Keais v. Kelley; Newsome v. Keais, Nos. A25A2193, A26A0122, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided July 15, 2026

Eric Keais was riding a bicycle when a vehicle driven by Ralph Dover struck him from behind. According to the complaint, Dover did not stop, and Eric was later found in a ditch with severe injuries and died that evening. His father, who alleged that Eric was unmarried and had no children, renewed a dismissed federal suit in state court “as next of kin and as administrator” of Eric’s estate.

A parent who may sue individually under § 51-4-4 may not also sue as administrator, the court held: “because Keais was entitled to bring a wrongful death action in his individual capacity, he could not also bring suit in his capacity as the administrator of Eric’s estate.” The father’s claim as next of kin went forward, and the renewal action was held to involve the same plaintiffs as the original suit. The court had issued an earlier opinion in the case on June 17, 2026; the July 15 opinion changed its ruling on a separate claim against another defendant, and the standing ruling is the same in both.

The Estate’s Separate Claim

Alongside the survivors’ claim, the decedent’s estate has its own. As the Supreme Court explained in 2018, OCGA § 9-2-41 “allows the victim’s estate to bring (or continue) a personal injury action against the wrongdoer,” for losses such as the decedent’s pain and suffering before death, and under § 51-4-5 (b), as the Court of Appeals quoted it in 2023, the personal representative “shall be entitled to recover for the funeral, medical, and other necessary expenses resulting from the injury and death of the deceased person.” The three decisions below, together with Geary above, concern that claim.

17. Department of Human Resources v. Phillips (1997)

Department of Human Resources v. Phillips, 268 Ga. 316, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided July 16, 1997

Lisa Phillips, who was severely mentally impaired after an illness in infancy, lived for more than 20 years at Central State Hospital. In 1992 she was found in cardiopulmonary arrest and died; an autopsy attributed her death to a combination of two anti-psychotic drugs, and the evidence at trial showed that one of them had not been prescribed for her in at least three years. Virginia Phillips sued the state as Lisa’s personal representative and as administrator of her estate, and a jury awarded $2 million for the full value of her life and $1.5 million for her pain and suffering.

The parties’ pretrial order had stipulated that the Georgia Tort Claims Act’s $1 million cap applied, and the Supreme Court enforced it. Because one individual had sued in two capacities, which the Court treated as “two distinct legal ‘persons,'” the judgment could not exceed $2 million, and the excess was reversed. The Court rejected the state’s argument that the award included punitive damages: counsel’s closing argument answered the state’s suggestion that Lisa’s impairment lessened the value of her life and did not “amount to a plea for punitive damages.” Two justices dissented.

18. Rai v. Reid (2013)

Rai v. Reid, 294 Ga. 270, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided November 25, 2013

Sparkle Reid was murdered in her apartment in April 2000 in the presence of her infant daughter. The case went cold until 2004, and her father-in-law, Chiman Rai, was eventually convicted of her murder. Her husband, Rai’s son, later abandoned the child, and her father, Bennet Reid, and his wife adopted her. Reid sued in 2008 as the child’s next friend and as administrator of the estate; the jury awarded $2.5 million to the child for wrongful death and $100,000 to the estate for pain and suffering, and the Court of Appeals divided six to six.

The Supreme Court divided the judgment. The estate’s claim, filed outside the two-year limit of § 9-3-33, was time-barred, and the killers’ efforts to avoid detection did not toll that limit for fraud because “a perpetrator’s desire not to be identified and caught is present in almost all crimes.” The wrongful death judgment stood. The superior court had equitable power to let the child’s claim proceed when the surviving spouse would not pursue it, and the trial court, which had found the claim tolled by the child’s minority under § 9-3-90 (a), properly kept the limitation defense to that claim from the jury. The decision was unanimous.

19. Cannon v. Barnes (2020)

Cannon v. Barnes, 357 Ga. App. 228, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided October 20, 2020

In February 2013, a pickup truck driven by Trevor Cannon crossed the median of Interstate 516 into oncoming traffic, and the collision killed Stephen and Camie Joyner; their three-year-old daughter survived. Camie, whose pregnancy had just been confirmed, was on the phone with her mother, who heard her scream “oh my god, look at that” and then heard the crash. By trial, the only remaining claim was the estate’s claim for Camie’s conscious pain and suffering, and the jury awarded $3,000,000, assigning 55 percent of the fault to Cannon and 45 percent to another driver sued as John Doe.

Quoting a 2002 decision, the court restated the rule that “the jury must have some evidence that the deceased at some point in time was conscious of her imminent death.” Evidence of her pregnancy and of her husband and daughter in the car was relevant to “her fright, shock, and mental suffering prior to the collision,” and the evidence that she saw the collision coming supported the award. The judgment was affirmed.

Unborn Children

For decades Georgia courts allowed a claim for the death of an unborn child only if the child was “quick,” able to move in the womb, at death. In 2019 the General Assembly passed House Bill 481, whose Section 6 added this sentence to OCGA § 19-7-1 (c) (1): “For the homicide of an unborn child, the right to recover for the full value of the life of such child shall begin at the point at which a detectable human heartbeat, as such term is defined in Code Section 1-2-1, is present.” Section 3 of the Act defined a “detectable human heartbeat” as “embryonic or fetal cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the heart within the gestational sac,” and the Act provides that it “shall become effective on January 1, 2020.” The four decisions below were all decided before that change and describe how the courts read the law then; this page does not address how the 2019 sentence has been applied.

20. Porter v. Lassiter (1955)

Porter v. Lassiter, 91 Ga. App. 712, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided February 18, 1955

Betty Jean Lassiter was a passenger in a car involved in a September 1953 collision and was injured in the lower abdomen. She was about a month and a half pregnant at the time; in December 1953, at about four and a half months, she miscarried, and she alleged that the collision’s injury to the placenta caused the child’s death.

Adopting the trial judge’s order as its own, the Court of Appeals held that “a suit may be maintained by the mother for the loss of a child that was ‘quick’ in her womb at the time of the homicide,” that the child need not have been “viable,” that the claim arises on the date of death, and that whether a child was quick “is a question of fact for a jury to determine.”

21. Shirley v. Bacon (1980)

Shirley v. Bacon, 154 Ga. App. 203, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided March 19, 1980

The plaintiff was two to three months pregnant when she was injured in a collision, and about a month later she underwent a therapeutic abortion that, she alleged, was made necessary by her injuries and the pelvic X-rays taken of them. She testified that she never felt the fetus move, and the trial court granted summary judgment to the defendants on the ground that the child was never “quick.”

Her testimony did not settle the question: “The mere fact that appellant had not felt the movement of the fetus does not necessarily mean that the fetus did not move or was not capable of movement at the time of the unborn child’s death.” No rule of law fixes quickening in the fourth month of pregnancy, the court added, and the fact that the death occurred through the therapeutic abortion would not bar the claim if a jury found that the abortion was necessitated by the defendants’ negligence. The summary judgment was reversed.

22. Peters v. Hospital Authority of Elbert County (1995)

Peters v. Hospital Authority of Elbert County, 265 Ga. 487, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided June 29, 1995

After Mrs. Peters delivered a stillborn child at Elbert Memorial Hospital, she and her husband, residents of South Carolina, sued in federal court as the child’s representatives for prenatal injuries and for the pain and suffering of the fetus. The Eleventh Circuit asked whether a stillborn child has a right to recover for injuries sustained in the womb.

The Supreme Court answered no, holding that “the fetal victim of a tort must be born alive in order to seek recovery from the alleged tortfeasor pursuant to OCGA § 51-1-9,” and it rejected an equal protection challenge. The decision addressed the child’s own tort claim; the Court noted that a parent of a stillborn child “is statutorily entitled to recover the full value of the life of the stillborn” under Porter and Shirley. House Bill 481 later defined “natural person” in § 1-2-1 to include “an unborn child”; this page does not address whether that change affects the rule stated in Peters.

23. Citron v. Ghaffari (2000)

Citron v. Ghaffari, 246 Ga. App. 826, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided November 16, 2000

A radiologist read Gisso Ghaffari’s ultrasound, taken at an estimated seven weeks and four days of pregnancy, as showing an ectopic pregnancy, and she was treated with methotrexate. Later ultrasounds showed a normal intrauterine pregnancy, and after consulting physicians put the chance of fetal abnormality from the drug at 30 percent, the Ghaffaris consented to end the pregnancy at about eight weeks. The only movement detected on any ultrasound was a fetal heartbeat.

The court held “as a matter of law that a heartbeat alone is not sufficient movement to constitute quickening.” Quickening “necessarily contemplates proof of the kind of movement that a mother potentially could feel, such as the movement of an arm or a leg,” and treating a heartbeat seen on a sonogram as enough would be “a marked shift” that “may more properly be the subject of legislative action.” The physicians were entitled to summary judgment. The 2019 amendment quoted at the start of this section ties the right to recover to the presence of a detectable heartbeat.

Deadlines and Deaths Outside Georgia

A wrongful death claim has no limitation period of its own; as the Court of Appeals put it in 2022, “the general two-year statute of limitation for personal injury claims” in OCGA § 9-3-33 applies. The seven decisions below concern when that period starts, when it is or is not paused, a claim added after it ran, the notice required before suing the state and deaths that occur outside Georgia.

24. McAuley v. Wills (1983)

McAuley v. Wills, 251 Ga. 3, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided May 11, 1983

Gail Parker was left paraplegic by a one-car crash in March 1979. She later married, and in August 1980 she gave birth to a child who died the next day of cardiac arrest caused, the opinion states, by the infant’s inability, due to the mother’s paraplegia, “to pass through the fetal course in an uneventful manner.” The parents sued the driver and others in April 1981 for the child’s wrongful death, and the trial court dismissed the claim.

Timeliness was not the obstacle, because “a wrongful-death action must be brought within two years from the death,” and the Supreme Court recognized that “at least in some situations, a person should be under a duty of care toward an unconceived child.” But the dismissal was affirmed because the driver’s negligence and the child’s death were “too remote for the law to sanction a recovery”: either the mother’s lost ability to give birth was part of her own injury claim, or the delivery “in a manner incompatible with the mother’s paraplegia” was an intervening act that was not reasonably foreseeable. Two justices dissented.

25. Miles v. Ashland Chemical Co. (1991)

Miles v. Ashland Chemical Co., 261 Ga. 726, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided November 15, 1991

Three employees of Great Dane Trailers died of cancer between 1979 and 1984. Their relatives said they first learned on September 3, 1987, of a link between cancer and methylene chloride, an ingredient of a product the defendants manufactured, and they sued in May 1989 for failure to warn. The Eleventh Circuit asked whether Georgia applies the discovery rule to wrongful death actions.

It does not, the Supreme Court answered: “an action for wrongful death ‘accrues’ to the heirs at death, not at the time the cause of the injury is discovered.” Because the statute creates a right unknown at common law, the Court declined to extend the limitation period, citing the risk of “potentially infinite liability.” Two justices dissented, arguing that time should favor families in “blameless ignorance” of the cause of a death.

26. Dorn v. Georgia Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities (2014)

Dorn v. Georgia Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities, 329 Ga. App. 384, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided October 29, 2014

Brooks Dorn died by suicide in April 2011 while on conditional release from a psychiatric facility operated by the department. His father, then without a lawyer, sent the state an ante litem notice of a wrongful death claim that described the loss as the “[m]onetary value of [the decedent’s] life in an amount sufficient to appropriately penalize” the state, without a dollar figure. The trial court dismissed the later suit.

Under the Georgia Tort Claims Act, the court held, “the ‘amount’ of any loss claimed is the dollar amount of the loss claimed, albeit to the extent of the claimant’s knowledge and belief,” and strict compliance is required. The loss was complete when the notice was sent, nothing showed that he could not assign a value to it, and acting without a lawyer did not excuse compliance. The court acknowledged that dismissal was “a harsh result.”

27. Auld v. Forbes (2020)

Auld v. Forbes, 309 Ga. 893, Supreme Court of Georgia, decided September 28, 2020

Fourteen-year-old Tomari Jackson drowned in February 2016 while swimming in a river on a school trip to a wildlife sanctuary in Belize. His mother sued in Georgia in March 2017, more than a year after his death. Belize law allows one year to bring a wrongful death claim, and the Court of Appeals had held that Georgia’s two-year period applied instead.

Reversing on that issue, the Supreme Court held that “Georgia wrongful death law does not apply extraterritorially” and that Belize’s one-year period, as part of the foreign cause of action, governed. Georgia’s public policy exception applies only to foreign law so “radically dissimilar to anything existing in our own system of jurisprudence” that it would “seriously contravene” Georgia policy, and “[a] mere difference in law is not sufficient.” The Court overruled Carroll Fulmer Logistics Corp. v. Hines (2011), which had applied Georgia law to a Florida collision because Florida measured wrongful death damages differently. The claim for the boy’s pain and suffering before his death was not before the Court.

28. Hicks v. Universal Health Services, Inc. (2022)

Hicks v. Universal Health Services, Inc., 364 Ga. App. 769, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided June 17, 2022

According to the complaints, Jacob Kosky was discharged from an in-patient mental health facility in October 2016 without adequate supervision or treatment, and 11 days later he shot and killed four people at a bonfire gathering; he pleaded guilty but mentally ill in 2019. More than four years after the shooting, the parents of three of those killed sued the companies that owned and operated the facility and the psychiatrist who evaluated Kosky, relying on OCGA § 9-3-99, which tolls the limitation period for a tort claim “that may be brought by the victim of an alleged crime” while the prosecution is pending.

In its ordinary meaning, the court held, “victim” refers to the person “acted on,” and “the crime at issue here is murder, and the parents have not been murdered.” A wrongful death claim belongs to the survivors rather than the decedent, so it is not a claim that may be brought by the victim, and the parents’ own wrongful death claims were therefore untimely. The estates’ claims were not at issue in the appeal. In a footnote the court observed that “it would be better policy to include similarly situated wrongful death plaintiffs” within the statute, but that the remedy lay with the legislature.

29. Toomer v. Metro Ambulance Services, Inc. (2022)

Toomer v. Metro Ambulance Services, Inc., 364 Ga. App. 469, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided June 24, 2022

In April 2016, Milton McBride, who was paraplegic, fell from a stretcher onto pavement while two ambulance company employees were carrying him; as the court described the facts, he had not been properly secured, and he fractured his neck and spine. He died in June 2017. The administrator of his estate sued for his injuries in April 2018, and after a forensic pathologist concluded that complications from the neck fractures caused his death, she added a wrongful death claim in October 2020, more than three years after the death. The trial court dismissed that claim as untimely.

Because the new claim arose from the same “core of operative facts” as the original complaint, it related back under OCGA § 9-11-15 (c) and was deemed filed within two years of the death, and the dismissal was reversed. The rule that the wrongful death statute is strictly construed did not change the result, since the court was applying the Civil Practice Act rather than interpreting that statute, and Miles was not to the contrary because relation back “does not toll a statute of limitation like a discovery rule does.” McBride had no spouse or children and his parents had died, so the administrator held both claims in the same capacity.

30. Sachy v. Allen (2022)

Sachy v. Allen, No. A22A1680, Court of Appeals of Georgia, decided December 6, 2022

Michelle Allen was a patient of Dr. Thomas Sachy from 2008 to 2016, and according to the complaint he over-prescribed the opiates that caused her death in August 2016 from oxycodone toxicity combined with an enlarged heart. Sachy was indicted in federal court in 2018. Her husband and daughter sued for wrongful death on August 30, 2021, five years after her death, relying on the crime victim tolling statute.

Following Hicks, decided months earlier, the court reversed the trial court’s ruling that the family members could be treated as victims. They “were not patients of Sachy and were not prescribed any medication, nor were they killed by the alleged over-prescription,” so § 9-3-99 did not toll their claims, which were untimely. The complaint asserted no claim on behalf of Michelle’s estate.

How These Decisions Were Selected and Checked

Each summary was written from the text of the opinion itself rather than from secondary descriptions. Citations use the Georgia Reports or Georgia Appeals Reports where the reporter citation was available; four decisions are cited by docket number and decision date. The summaries cover the issues discussed here and not every issue in each appeal, and facts are stated as the court described them, including allegations where a case was decided on the pleadings or on summary judgment. Statutory language is quoted as the court quoted it in the year of the decision. Where a decision on this page overruled or relied on another decision listed here, or where a later decision reviewed for this page overruled or limited one, the summary says so; a full review of each decision’s later history was not performed. Research for this page was completed in September 2026.

Statutes and Legislative Summaries Cited

House Bill 481 (2019), as passed, Georgia General Assembly

Summary of General Statutes Enacted at the 2nd Session of the 157th General Assembly (2024), Georgia Office of Legislative Counsel

Summary of General Statutes Enacted at the 1st Session of the 158th General Assembly (2025), Georgia Office of Legislative Counsel

Summary of General Statutes Enacted at the 2nd Session of the 158th General Assembly (2026), Georgia Office of Legislative Counsel

About This Page

This page summarizes published appellate decisions for general information. It is not legal advice and does not describe how the law applies to any particular claim. Court decisions can be limited, distinguished or overruled, and statutes change; the outcome of a case depends on its facts and on the version of the law that applies to it.