ATLANTA — The Georgia Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a Confederate ancestors organization's case seeking to block the Newton County government's planned removal of a Civil War memorial statue from the Covington Square.
However, justices ruled they would only consider arguments about if the Georgia Constitution requires an injury to be proven before any lawsuits can be considered based on a state law about such memorials.
Georgia Supreme Court ruled it will hear oral arguments in June in the Sons of Confederate Veterans' (SCV) appeal of a Georgia Court of Appeals' July 2021 ruling in favor of Newton County government.
The Supreme Court's Tuesday ruling stated justices were "particularly concerned" with the question of if the state constitution requires plaintiffs to prove they were injured by removal of a statue before they can file a lawsuit under a state law that "creates a cause of action" allowing anyone to seek damages "without a showing of individualized injury."
"Briefs should be submitted only on these points," the justices told attorneys.
SCV attorney T. Kyle King said, "My clients and I appreciate the Supreme Court’s willingness to review the lower courts’ decision on this important issue."
Newton County has a policy of not commenting on pending litigation.
The Court of Appeals decision upheld Newton County Superior Court Judge John Ott's September 2020 ruling that he agreed with the county government's claim the SCV lacked legal standing to seek damages for injuries it may suffer from the 115-year-old statue's removal.
The appeals court agreed with the county's claim that any injuries would be “purely psychic” and were neither "concrete" nor "particularized" and affecting the plaintiff "in a personal and individual way" — which courts generally have ruled must be required before damages could be awarded.
The ruling stemmed from the Newton County Board of Commissioners’ July 2020 vote to remove the granite statue from a park in the middle of the Square where it has stood since 1906.
Newton County resident Tiffany Humphries filed a lawsuit seeking damages and an injunction in Newton County Superior Court the day before the board of commissioners voted, while the SCV filed a similar suit the day after the vote. The two cases were later combined.
Ott heard oral arguments during a hearing in late July 2020 and issued his ruling that “the plaintiffs lacked standing to file suit because they suffered no injury and that, even if they had standing, their claims were barred by sovereign immunity.”
Sovereign immunity was the legal concept in the Georgia constitution in September 2020 that governments cannot be sued for an action done in their official capacities. Georgia voters in November 2020 voted to amend the constitution to waive sovereign immunity on actions taken after Jan. 1, 2021.
Ott also ordered the Newton County government not to remove the statue — as some other counties had done — until all appeals had ended.
State law says in part, "...No publicly owned monument erected, constructed, created, or maintained on the public property of this state or its agencies, departments, authorities, or instrumentalities or on real property owned by an agency or the state of Georgia shall be relocated, removed, concealed, obscured, or altered in any fashion by any officer or agency; provided, however, that appropriate measures for the preservation, protection, and interpretation of such monument or memorial shall not be prohibited."
It also allows a governmental entity to remove a memorial statue if it stands in the way of a road or building construction project but requires it be moved to a place of "similar prominence, honor, visibility and access within the same county or municipality in which the monument was originally located."
