Golden v. Floyd Healthcare Management, Inc

Jami Lynn Golden went to a Floyd County hospital emergency room in 2016 with symptoms of what turned out to be sepsis, and she later suffered amputations after her condition worsened. She first sued in federal court, then voluntarily dropped that case and refiled in Floyd County Superior Court in October 2021. The hospital argued her new lawsuit came too late because Georgia's five-year deadline for filing medical malpractice suits, called a statute of repose, had already expired in July 2021. The trial court disagreed, finding that the COVID-19 judicial emergency orders issued in 2020 paused that deadline long enough to make her filing timely. The Court of Appeals of Georgia reversed, saying those emergency orders never paused statutes of repose. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed with the Court of Appeals, holding that the emergency orders did pause the deadline, that doing so was allowed by state law, and that pausing it did not violate the hospital's constitutional rights because the hospital's rights under the deadline had not yet taken effect when the pause began.

The court held that the 2004 Judicial Emergency Act lets a chief justice pause statutes of repose during a declared emergency, that former Chief Justice Melton's March 2020 order actually did pause the five-year medical malpractice deadline, and that applying that pause here did not violate the hospital's due process rights because its rights had not yet vested.

The ruling clarifies that Georgia's COVID-era court orders paused strict filing deadlines in malpractice and other cases governed by statutes of repose, not just ordinary statutes of limitation. That affects any pending or future dispute over whether a lawsuit filed during or after the pandemic was filed on time.

Judgment of the Court of Appeals reversed

1. The court read Georgia's Judicial Emergency Act (O.C.G.A. § 38-3-62 (a)), which lets a chief justice 'suspend, toll, extend, or otherwise grant relief from deadlines' during a declared emergency, and found that a statute of repose (a strict time limit that cuts off a right to sue after a fixed number of years) fits the plain meaning of a 'deadline' the law lets a chief justice pause.
2. The court noted the statute's list of covered deadlines is explicitly non-exhaustive ('including, but not limited to'), so the absence of the words 'statute of repose' in the text did not exclude it from being pausable.
3. The court limited an earlier ruling, Simmons v. Sonyika, which had said statutes of repose 'cannot be tolled,' explaining that Simmons only addressed a different, older statute that could not have been meant to affect a repose statute enacted over a century later, and disapproved any reading of Simmons or other cases as an absolute bar on ever pausing a repose statute.
4. Applying that reasoning to former Chief Justice Melton's March 14, 2020 emergency order, which used nearly identical 'suspends, tolls, extends' language and later guidance confirming it applied to 'all proceedings and filing deadlines,' the court concluded the order did pause the five-year medical malpractice deadline.
5. The court then addressed the hospital's due process argument, relying on its recent decision in Southern States Chemical, Inc. v. Tampa Tank & Welding, Inc., which held that a defendant gains a constitutionally protected right to be free from a claim only once the repose deadline actually expires and extinguishes the plaintiff's right to sue.
6. Because the emergency order paused the deadline before it would have expired in July 2021, the hospital's rights under the repose statute had not yet vested when the pause took effect, so applying the pause did not strip the hospital of any constitutionally protected right.

• statute of repose
• COVID-19 judicial emergency order
• medical malpractice lawsuit
• due process
• hospital negligence