Legal Insights for Clients and Colleagues Across Nashville, Kentucky and Georgia

On 10/20/10 the Tennessee Supreme Court reinstated a jury verdict obtained by David Randolph Smith & Associates for the widow of a Tennessee Army National Guard sergeant who died in 2000. The jury had awarded $7.2 million in the Tennessee wrongful death lawsuit against River Park Hospital of McMinnville. The Tennessee Supreme Court’s reinstatement of the verdict resulted in a total award, with interest, of $10.7 million. Warren County court officials said the multimillion-dollar judgment was the largest amount awarded by a jury in county history at the time of its award.A copy of the opinion is available here.

Settlement in significant wrongful death case filed in Overton County, Tennessee in a mediation held in Nashville, Tennessee on July 25, 2005. The case involved the failure to treat and diagnose group b strep in a pregnant mother whose child was brain damaged and ultimately died from sepsis stemming from exposure to the group b strep during labor. The terms of the settlement are confidential.The firm is currently handling another group b strep medical malpractice case in state court in Tupelo, Mississippi.

The Georgia Court of Appeals ruled that parents can be held liable for defamation and invasion of privacy if a child’s Facebook page is defamatory or violates privacy rights. Two parents whose teenager set up a fake Facebook page to ridicule a classmate will face a defamation trial. Even though they didn’t create the page, the parents could be liable because they allowed it to remain up for more than a year, the court said. In 2011, Alexandria (Alex) Boston, a middle school student in Cobb County, Georgia, shared a homeroom class with Dustin Athearn and Melissa Snodgrass. Athearn and Snodgrass created a fake Facebook page under Boston’s name. They posted pictures of her taken using a “fat face” app and wrote posts that suggested she had racist views and was a lesbian, according to a report published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.“Some of these postings were graphically sexual, racist, or otherwise offensive and some falsely stated that Alex was on a medication regimen for mental health disorders and that she took illegal drugs,” wrote the three-judge appeals panel in their opinion (PDF). The Court in the case, styled, Boston v. Athearn, explained: “[p]arents may be held directly liable . . . for their own negligence in failing to supervise or control their child with regard to conduct which poses an unreasonable risk of harming others,” a duty which extends to those plaintiffs whose harm is foreseeable.”The fake account made more than 70 “friends” when Athearn sent out invites to Boston’s classmates, friends, and family.Boston suspected Athearn had made the page; her parents, Amy and Christopher Boston, reported the matter to the school principal. Athearn and Snodgrass admitted to creating the page and were punished with two-day suspensions. The principal notified their parents as well.