Hello, this is Nelson Abbott from Abbott Law Firm. So today I want to talk about a wrongful death case that just came out from the Utah Supreme Court. This was an opinion authored by Justice Lee. It is not my case but it does involve a Provo wrongful death. So back, this is a super old case, I don’t know why it took so long to get through the courts. But back in 2010, a woman named Helen Faucheaux took some drugs and was acting really drowsy. And so her boyfriend or husband, whatever, became concerned about her and called 911. The police came to her house and looked at her and said, “Oh, she just looks like she needs to sleep this off, she’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.” And then they left.
And then about two hours later, he went and checked on her again and she was dead. And it turned out she died from presumably, I guess an accidental drug overdose. So I don’t know the case, the trial court case number starts with a 10, so that means the case was filed in 2010, 8 years ago or actually, that’s 9 years ago now. But anyways the case kind of languished for six years which isn’t really explained when Provo City filed a motion to dismiss for failure to join the proper party. What they’d done is the caption of the complaint said that they were suing on behalf of the estate rather than the personal representative of the estate suing on behalf of the heirs. That’s a small error but an important error. There is a case in Utah from a few years back that says that’s not the way the complaint should be done.
If you read the text of the complaint, however, it made clear that they were really suing, the personal representative was suing on behalf of the heirs. Well, at six years into this litigation which is just crazy long, unacceptably long. But anyway, six years in, Provo City filed this motion to dismiss and it was granted by the trial court judge and the case was thrown out. And so they appealed it to the court of appeals and the court of appeals decided against Provo City. And then Provo City then appealed to the Utah Supreme Court who again decided against Provo City.
And basically what they said was, even though the caption on the complaint was wrong, that’s not the most important thing, what’s really the most important thing is if you read the words of the complaint itself, if the words of the complaint actually show that it was filed properly then that’s good. And so since when the words of the complaint are carefully read it was clear that it was a personal representative suing on behalf of the estate and everything was good.
The other thing that they said was, well, even if they, the attorneys had messed this up and done it wrong, they shouldn’t have just thrown the case out. They should have let the heirs or the, yeah, the heirs I guess of the deceased person reword their complaint to fix the problem. The reason that’s important is because there’s a statute of limitations in these cases.
And so six years into the litigation, the statute of limitations would have run and they can’t refile so the case would have been over. But if they’re allowed to reword their complaint and fix the error then that solves that problem and allows the case to go forward. What’s the concern about letting people do that is well, you know, that really just means the statute of limitations no longer means anything.
But in a case like this, that’s not really a big concern because obviously, Provo City knew what was going on, they understood that it was the heirs that were going to benefit from this lawsuit and so there was really no surprise or delay to Provo City. They understood from the very beginning exactly how the case was gonna proceed and it was just this minor technical error that the attorney had made in drafting the complaint.
So I want to congratulate Justice Lee on this, I think this is a good opinion. It’s good for the justice system in general because it really goes down to, “Hey, let’s not be sticklers and just throw cases out because of really insignificant errors that don’t really mean anything.” And it’s also good for this family, I suppose.
Now the one person that does lose in this is the City of Provo. The City of Provo doesn’t totally lose, they can still defend the lawsuit. The family still has to prove that City of Provo acted unreasonably that they breached some duty that they owe as a government employee or a police or, you know, the 911 in sending the wrong person or making an incorrect diagnosis. That is still up in the air and Provo City can defend on that and I’m sure it will be now another, well, it’ll be a while until that is resolved unless they can settle it out of court.
But I thought that was an interesting case today because it doesn’t involve a wrongful death and it is in Provo which is the city in which I practice and it’s good for those trying to make wrongful death claims. And so I wanted to discuss that case today. I know this is kind of a highly-technical subject and really goes to kind of the minutia that attorneys deal with on a day in and day out basis.
But I think it does emphasize to attorneys and hopefully to everybody that, you know, we can’t take for granted that it’s easy to do these things, we need to be really careful, cross our t’s, dot our i’s when we do these complaints to make sure that we do the best we can for our client. So I hope that you found this informative and interesting and I wish the best of luck to the litigants in this case and they get this thing resolved quickly. And so, hey, well, good talking to you today. Have a good week and I’ll see you next week. Thanks.