Andreana Williams, as conservator for her mother Michelle Hewett, filed a medical malpractice action against Regency Hospital Company, LLC, Regency Hospital Company of Macon, LLC (“Regency”), and Regency’s employee Jacquita Baldwin, APRN. The defendants moved to dismiss based on the expiration of the two-year statute of limitation for medical malpractice actions. In response, Williams argued that the statute of limitation was tolled because Hewett meets the definition of incompetency under OCGA § 9-30-90 (a) and that OCGA § 9-3-73(b), which provides that the statute of limitation for medical malpractice claims shall not be tolled for plaintiffs who are “legally incompetent,” violates Hewett’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The trial court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss, ruling that the Supreme Court of Georgia had already decided the constitutional issue contrary to Hewett’s position in Deen v. Stevens, 287 Ga. 597, 698 S.E.2d 321 (2010). The Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court of Georgia granted certiorari to consider whether Deen controls this case, and if not, whether OCGA § 9-3-73(b) violates Hewett’s rights under the Equal Protection Clause by arbitrarily treating mentally incompetent medical-malpractice plaintiffs differently than mentally incompetent plaintiffs in other kinds of lawsuits.
Williams argued that OCGA § 9-3-73(b) violated Hewett’s equal protection rights under the United States Constitution because the statute treats mentally incompetent plaintiffs in medical malpractice actions differently, and unequally, from mentally incompetent plaintiffs in non-medical malpractice actions.
The Supreme Court of Georgia stated: “To evaluate whether OCGA § 9-3-73(b) violates the equal-protection rights of mentally incompetent plaintiffs with medical malpractice claims, as compared to mentally incompetent plaintiffs with other types of civil claims, we apply the same standard that was applied in Deen … a statutory classification that neither proceeds along suspect lines nor infringes fundamental constitutional rights must be upheld against equal protection challenge if there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification … The critical question is whether Williams has met her burden of showing that “suspending the tolling provisions for mental incompetence in medical malpractice cases is not rationally related to the General Assembly’s stated objectives.””
In Dean, “Applying rational-basis review, this Court held that the General Assembly’s decision to not have a tolling provision for mental incompetence in medical malpractice cases was rationally related to its stated objectives of ensuring “affordable access to quality healthcare” and “stem[ming] ․ the filing of stale medical malpractice lawsuits.” Id. at 604–08, 698 S.E.2d 321 (citation omitted). We accordingly upheld the constitutionality of the statute and rejected the equal-protection challenge.”
The Georgia Supreme Court held in its August 26, 2025 decision in this case: “Williams has not cited any case where this Court, or any other court, has held that a legislative solution is not rationally related to a legitimate government objective simply because there may be other viable approaches to address the problem or simply because there may be another, broader, and perhaps even “better” solution to the problem. These are policy decisions which the General Assembly is uniquely situated to address, and under federal rational basis review, courts may not substitute our policy preferences for theirs. See Deen, 287 Ga. at 606, 698 S.E.2d 321 (“It is not the role of the courts, however, to weigh those policy arguments and decide on that course which is most prudent; instead, it is quite enough to note the existence of a viable, ongoing debate and to find ․ that the General Assembly’s approach to a particularly thorny legislative problem—embodied in its statutes of limitations—is rational.” (cleaned up)). Thus, like the plaintiff in Deen, Williams has failed to meet the high burden required to demonstrate that the statute is unconstitutional. We therefore conclude that Deen largely controls Williams’s constitutional challenge to OCGA § 9-3-73(b); that the expert affidavit requirement found in OCGA § 9-11-9.1 does not change the analysis or aid Williams’s position; and that Williams has not met her burden of showing that OCGA § 9-3-73(b) is not rationally related to a legitimate legislative objective. For these reasons, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.”
Source Williams v. Regency Hospital Company, LLC, S25G0276.
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