The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to settle the issue of whether housing authorities accused of negligence are shielded from civil liability when tenants sue over dangerous or unsafe conditions.
Christina Guy, a former tenant at the troubled Dogwood Terrace apartment complex in downtown Augusta, sued the city’s housing authority in the summer of 2022, after she was shot in the leg while on her front porch during an armed robbery the previous year, according to court records.
In Guy v. Housing Authority of the City of Augusta, Guy alleged the authority was liable because security and safety at the complex were found wanting.
In an opinion that will disappoint both housing advocates and housing authorities seeking clarity, the court avoided the question of whether the Augusta Housing Authority has sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine shielding government entities from liability.
Instead, the court found the appeals court used the wrong legal framework in upholding the trial court’s ruling in favor of the housing authority, and said the question of whether the agency has immunity as a so-called “instrumentality” of the city of Augusta remained unresolved.
“Neither the trial court nor the Court of Appeals has done that analysis yet, such that it would be imprudent for this court to reach out and decide that question ourselves in the first instance based on the briefing before us,” Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson wrote in the 16-page opinion that vacated the decision and remanded the case to the appeals court in Atlanta.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
The Georgia Trial Lawyers Association said in a February brief that a ruling in favor of the housing authority, and by extension all the others in the state, could prevent thousands of low-income residents from taking legal action if they lived in neglected homes.
Conversely, the housing authorities of Macon-Bibb County, Columbus and the city of Decatur argued in a March brief that an adverse ruling against housing authorities threatened to bury them in litigation, making it more difficult for them to offer affordable housing.
Kyle Califf, Guy’s Augusta-based attorney, said during arguments in May that the housing authority is not a department, agency, county or municipality under Georgia’s Constitution. And as a distinct, independent entity, the authority could not avoid Guy’s civil claims, he said.
But the housing authority’s lawyer, Christopher A. Cosper, countered that all government entities, including housing authorities, enjoy sovereign immunity. He cited protections under the common law of England as of 1776, which he said informed Georgia law.
It’s that centuries-old common law the appeals court should consider as it uses a historical analysis to reexamine Guy’s claims, Chief Justice Peterson wrote in the opinion.
“Because no court has yet performed an analysis of the common law for us to review … we vacate the Court of Appeals’ judgment and remand this case for consideration of the issue of the authority’s immunity under the proper analytical approach,” Peterson wrote.
In a footnote, the court noted that the city of Augusta and Richmond County are now a “consolidated government.”
That could be telling because the high court’s prior rulings made clear that counties have sovereign immunity under the Georgia Constitution — which governs sovereign immunity for the state and its departments and agencies — while cities do not, the footnote states.
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