Nashville, Tenn. –The Tennessee Supreme Court held today that a lawsuit against a nursing home facility may continue, even though the plaintiff in the case, resident Annie Jones, had died.
Ms. Jones was an elderly resident of Life Care Center, a nursing home in Tullahoma, Tennessee. In 2019, while nursing home employees were helping Ms. Jones bathe, one of the employees took a video call from her boyfriend, a jail inmate. The employee positioned the phone in a way that showed Ms. Jones’s nude body on the video call. The jail was monitoring the call and saw the video.
Ms. Jones’s daughter, Calisa Joyce Sons, filed a lawsuit on behalf of her mother against Life Care in Crockett County. The lawsuit alleged that Life Care committed the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, which is a type of invasion of privacy.
Life Care argued that the trial court should dismiss the lawsuit because Ms. Jones was so mentally impaired that she was unaware of the video call and was not injured by it. The trial court dismissed the lawsuit and Ms. Sons appealed. While the appeal was pending, Ms. Jones died. The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.
The Tennessee Supreme Court granted Life Care’s request to appeal. On appeal, Life Care argued that Ms. Sons’s lawsuit abated, or ended, when Ms. Jones died, and it asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the lawsuit.
Under Tennessee law, most tort lawsuits can continue to go forward even if the plaintiff dies. There is one exception—suits for “wrongs affecting the character of the plaintiff” abate, or end, when the plaintiff dies. Life Care argued that the privacy tort of intrusion upon seclusion fit this exception.
The Tennessee Supreme Court disagreed. It held that, even though Ms. Jones was severely cognitively impaired, “she nevertheless had the right not to involuntarily have her nude body put on display.” The Court found that the privacy tort of intrusion upon seclusion does not involve the plaintiff’s character at all, so the lawsuit on behalf of Ms. Jones did not abate when Ms. Jones died. The Court reversed the trial court’s dismissal of the lawsuit.
To read the opinion in Annie J. Jones, By and Through Her Conservatorship, Joyce Sons a/k/a Calisa Joyce Sons v. Life Care Centers of America d/b/a Life Care Center of Tullahoma, authored by Chief Justice Holly Kirby, visit the Supreme Court opinions section of TNCourts.gov.
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