CLARK v. LEIGH (And Vice Versa)

April Clark died in 2019 after complications from ovarian cyst surgery, during which her bowel was accidentally cut. Her husband and daughter sued the doctors who treated her afterward for wrongful death and for her pain and suffering before she died. A Bibb County jury awarded over $31 million total, but after trial the doctors asked the judge to apply a Georgia law capping certain noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $350,000. The trial judge agreed and slashed the wrongful death award to $350,000. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed. It first reaffirmed its 2010 decision in a case called Nestlehutt, holding that Georgia's constitutional right to a jury trial does not allow this cap to be applied to pain-and-suffering damages in malpractice cases. Because the cap statute treats all noneconomic damages in a case as one lump sum, and part of that sum here (the pain-and-suffering award) can't legally be capped, the whole cap can't be applied to this verdict. The court undid the reduced judgment and sent the case back to the trial court to resolve a remaining issue about whether the wrongful death award itself was excessive.

The court held that Georgia's noneconomic damages cap statute cannot be applied to any verdict, like this one, that combines wrongful death damages with pain-and-suffering damages protected by the constitutional right to trial by jury, because the statute caps only a single combined total and offers no way to cap part of a verdict without also capping the constitutionally protected part.

The ruling means Georgia families who win large wrongful death and pain-and-suffering verdicts in medical malpractice cases involving multiple types of harm may keep the full jury award rather than having it capped, reshaping how hospitals, insurers, and trial lawyers evaluate malpractice risk and settlement strategy statewide.

Vacated and remanded with direction

1. The court first held the trial judge did not abuse his discretion (a deferential standard asking only whether the judge's choice was reasonable) in letting the doctors raise the damages cap for the first time after trial, because the cap statute sets a legal limit on recovery rather than an affirmative defense that must be raised earlier.
2. The court then declined to overturn its 2010 decision in Nestlehutt, applying the doctrine of stare decisis (the principle that courts should generally stick with prior rulings unless they are clearly wrong), and concluded the doctors had not shown that Nestlehutt's holding that the jury trial right is more than a mere procedural formality was obviously and harmfully wrong.
3. Because Nestlehutt already established that capping pain-and-suffering and loss-of-consortium damages in malpractice cases violates the right to trial by jury, the court examined how the cap statute actually works: it lumps all noneconomic damages for all claims into one 'total amount recoverable' and caps that single sum at $350,000.
4. Applying ordinary statutory interpretation, the court found no language in the statute allowing a judge to apply the cap only to some claims (like wrongful death) while excluding others (like pain and suffering); rewriting the statute to allow that kind of split application would exceed the court's constitutional role.
5. Because the jury's $2,500,000 pain-and-suffering award cannot constitutionally be capped, and the statute requires capping the combined total including that award, the entire cap could not be applied to this verdict, so the trial court's reduction of the wrongful death award had to be vacated.
6. Since the trial court never reached the doctors' separate argument that the wrongful death award itself was excessive (because it thought the cap mooted that issue), the case was sent back for the trial court to decide that remaining question.

• wrongful death damages
• medical malpractice cap
• jury trial right
• Nestlehutt precedent
• noneconomic damages