After Darren Penn and Mike Terry successfully argued on behalf of sexual abuse victims of the Catholic Church before Supreme Court of Georgia, the Court of Appeals reversed its position on one of their previously rejected cases.

What You Need to Know

• The Georgia Court of Appeals had originally declined to hear oral arguments for the case.
• However, the state Supreme Court issued a grant, vacate, remand order after ruling favorably in a different case brought by the same plaintiffs.
• The trial court's rulings were partially reversed and the case is on track to begin discovery in trial court.

 

The Georgia Court of Appeals released a new opinion partially reversing a prior decision to affirm a trial court’s ruling to dismiss three Athens churches, Green Acres, Beech Haven and First Baptist, from lawsuits brought by six plaintiffs alleging sexual abuse.

The reconsideration, published on June 29, came after the state Supreme Court issued a grant, vacate, remand order to the Court of Appeals to view the case in light of its recently-issued decision in Doe v. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, another case argued by plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel Darren Penn of the Penn Law Group and lead appellate counsel Mike Terry of Bondurant Mixson & Elmore.

“It’s a huge thing for a lot of people, and so was the Catholic Church case, because that laid the groundwork for this case and also had numerous victims who were impacted by the ruling,” Terry said.

The new opinion was authored by Presiding Judge Sarah Doyle with judges Trenton Brown and Herbert Phipps concurring. While the opinion affirmed the trial court’s dismissal of RICO and public nuisance claims against the churches, it reversed the dismissal of several other claims as well as derivative attorney fees and punitive damages claims and vacated in part, remanding the case back to the trial court to begin discovery.

Read the plaintiff-appellants’ briefs.

“The Court of Appeals did a good job of going through what the Supreme Court said and following its direction,” Terry said. “We are pleased with the outcome.”

The six plaintiff appellants, former Boy Scouts, alleged that two scoutmasters employed at the churches had abused them during their 1950-1977 tenures. They further contended that the churches and the Boy Scouts of America had engaged in two separate conspiracies to cover up the abuse.

Read the defendant-appellees’ brief.

The appellate court had originally held that the plaintiff-appellants could not benefit from fraud-based tolling, because “the abuse itself revealed that the church had wronged the plaintiffs.”

 

However, St. Joseph’s rejected this line of reasoning. Now, plaintiffs are allowed to introduce evidence to support tolling for claims premised on the church’s conduct, or, according to the appellate opinion, “where a plaintiff seeks to hold a church vicariously liable for the abuse itself, the claim is not subject to tolling based on the suppression of information regarding the church’s knowledge of the priest’s dangerousness.”

The root of this reasoning is that the court can’t say with legal certainty that the plaintiffs can’t introduce evidence that supports their claims that the church’s concealed the scoutmasters’ behavior or that this information can’t be independently obtained. According to the opinion, “the complaints further alleged that the plaintiffs discovered ‘within the statutory period’ that they were not the only victims, and that the churches were aware of the abuse.”

Though the court reanalyzed the plaintiff-appellants’ RICO complaints in light of the new ruling, it ultimately upheld the trial court’s dismissal, as the plaintiffs’ complaint didn’t show that their injuries came directly from the coverup. It also rejected their respondeat-superior claims as it was filed after the statute of limitation.

Defendant-appellee counsel for the case included Kathryn Whitlock of McAngus Goudelock & Courie, Kevin Hudson of Hudson Lambert Parrott, Stephen Rothring of Wood Smith Henning & Berman and others. Defendant-appellee counsel was not available for comment by the time of publication. The Boy Scouts of America was involved in the underlying litigation but not the appeal.

The case is McArthur v. Beech Haven Baptist Church of Athens, No. A21A0898, in the Court of Appeals of Georgia.