The Supreme Court of Georgia has vacated and remanded a lower court ruling that granted sovereign immunity to the Housing Authority of the City of Augusta.
The unanimous opinion, authored by Chief Justice Nels Peterson and released Tuesday, follows the presentation of oral arguments by Augusta attorneys Christopher Cooper and Kyle Califf on May 13.
The decision stems from a 2022 personal injury lawsuit filed by Christina Guy, a resident of the authority’s Dogwood Terrace housing complex. Guy, who was shot in the leg during a robbery attempt, alleged the housing authority failed to provide adequate security.
Both Richmond County State Court and the Georgia Court of Appeals sided with the authority, determining it was immune from the lawsuit as an “instrumentality” of the City of Augusta.
The Supreme Court disagreed, finding neither court had correctly examined whether the authority qualified for immunity.
Sovereign immunity is a legal doctrine that protects governments from being sued unless immunity has been waived. In Georgia, the state and its departments derive the immunity from Article I of the Georgia Constitution, while cities and their agencies generally must justify immunity based on common law or explicit legislation.
The Court of Appeals concluded the authority was immune because it was performing essential public functions using public funds, but cited cases involving state entities such as the Georgia Lottery Corporation and Georgia Ports Authority, according to the opinion.
But those cases did not apply because they dealt with entities directly connected to the state, it said.
“The question of whether an entity is protected by sovereign immunity as an ‘instrumentality’ of a municipality is a question that can be answered only by reviewing the common law scope and nature of sovereign immunity as it applied to instrumentalities of municipalities,” Peterson wrote.
And because the lower courts did not fully explore the common law basis for immunity, the justices declined to decide the matter themselves. Instead they returned the case to the Court of Appeals, which can conduct the analysis or return the case to the trial court.
Whether an entity has immunity under common law would involve looking at whether entities similar to housing authorities were recognized under 18th-century English law as being immune from civil liability.
The Supreme Court noted a potentially complicating factor in the analysis of Augusta’s status as a consolidated city-county government. While counties are explicitly protected under Article I, municipalities are not.
