Supreme Court upholds statute of repose

Missouri's Supreme Court ruled 6-1 Tuesday that a state law blocking some malpractice lawsuits doesn't violate the state Constitution.

The ruling came in a lawsuit seeking to sue SSM DePaul Health Center for malpractice because a St. Louis area woman discovered objects had been left in her body nearly 14 years after her surgery due to an auto accident.

The 21-page majority opinion, written by Judge Laura Denvir Stith, upholds the Legislature's 1976 decision to enact a statute of repose setting a specific time limit on when a person can take a case to court.

The court ruled the repose limit is different from a statute of limitations, which also provides time limits for lawsuits but sometimes can be blocked from starting for a period of time - a process called tolling.

The statute of repose begins counting as soon as the event happened.

Also, the dispute is not just a wording fight among lawyers.

The court's ruling blocked Shonda Ambers-Phillips and her husband, Richard Phillips II, from suing SSM DePaul for leaving four foreign objects - which have not been defined in the court documents - in her body during surgery in 1999.

Ambers-Phillips didn't discover the mistake until 2013, when she experiencing pain in her side and had a second exploratory surgery at a different hospital.

"While statutes of limitations are subject to equitable tolling in certain circumstances, statutes of repose by their nature are not," Stith wrote for the court. "They begin to run on the date of the allegedly tortious act and provide an absolute deadline beyond which suit may not be brought.

"To toll them disregards this basic purpose of statutes of repose - that of providing a final time limit beyond which suit is foreclosed."

Although the court said it agreed Missourians have a "right to bring suit for medical malpractice" and the right "is one protected by the right to jury trial and may not be unreasonably foreclosed," the majority opinion also rejected "the argument that it is a fundamental right to which heightened scrutiny applies."

The court ruled the Phillipses failed to show the statute of repose is a prohibited special law or that lawmakers didn't have a rational basis for passing the 10-year time limit.

"While a statute of limitation allows a cause of action to accrue and then blocks the claim if the suit is not filed within a legislatively determined time period," the majority ruled, "a statute of repose "eliminates the cause of action altogether after a certain period of time following a specified event,' with the specified event in this case being the alleged medical malpractice."

Judge Richard Teitelman was the lone voice arguing the court should have allowed the Phillipses to pursue their lawsuit against SSM DePaul.

"As applied to Ms. Ambers-Phillips, practical effect of the 10-year statute of repose is nothing short of the outright abrogation of her right to seek a remedy for the negligent infliction of serious bodily injury," Teitelman wrote in a five-page dissent. "I would hold that the Missouri Constitution requires the provision of an adequate substitute remedy when a statute has the effect of extinguishing an injured person's right to a "certain remedy' for negligently inflicted bodily injury."

Teitelman acknowledged "there may be perfectly good reasons to adopt statutes of repose in some cases," but said the facts of the Ambers-Phillips case "illustrate the problem of redefining individual constitutional rights according to political whim."

Teitelman said the court should have decided "the 10-year statute of repose in section 516.105 is unconstitutional as applied to Ms. Ambers-Phillips because the statute bars her from asserting a recognized cause of action for bodily injury before she possibly could have."