Statutes And Statues

The Georgia Supreme Court has held that an individual in an affected community has standing to seek injunctive relief against the removal of a Confederate statute.

As alleged in the relevant complaint, the Henry County Board of Commissioners in July 2020 voted to remove a Confederate monument from the courthouse square in McDonough. As a result of this vote, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Colonel Charles T. Zachry Camp #108, and Georgia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans, filed suit against the Board seeking injunctive relief and damages, asserting that the Henry County Board’s vote signaled an intention to violate OCGA § 50-3-1 (b)

Sons of Confederate Veterans without a community tie lack standing.

This case is about a highly controversial subject: whether local communities must continue displaying (and maintaining at public expense) monuments that celebrate the Confederacy and its long-dead supporters, despite those communities finding such celebration repugnant. But nothing about those monuments is at issue in this appeal.

Instead, this appeal presents only a discrete and important threshold question: whether the Georgia Constitution requires a plaintiff to establish some cognizable injury to bring a lawsuit in Georgia courts, i.e., to have standing to sue, separate and apart from the statutory authorization to bring suit. This question has broad implications far beyond the underlying controversy.

After a full review of the relevant history and context, our answer is this: to invoke a Georgia court’s “judicial power,” a plaintiff must have a cognizable injury that can be redressed by a judicial decision. Courts are not vehicles for engaging in merely academic debates or deciding purely theoretical questions. We “say what the law is” only as needed to resolve an actual controversy. To that end, only plaintiffs with a cognizable injury can bring a suit in Georgia courts. Unlike federal law, however, that injury need not always be individualized; sometimes it can be a generalized grievance shared by community members, especially other residents, taxpayers, voters, or citizens.

Here

Applying that framework to this case, T. Davis Humphries, as a private citizen, has standing to assert a claim for injunctive relief against her local county government for its planned removal of a Confederate monument in alleged violation of OCGA § 50-3-1. But the other plaintiffs — the various Sons of Confederate Veterans entities — have not shown that they are members of the communities the governments of which they seek to sue, and they have alleged no other cognizable injury sufficient to establish their standing. The Court of Appeals was therefore wrong to affirm the dismissal of Humphries’s complaint for a lack of standing as to her claim for injunctive relief, but it was right to affirm the dismissal of the complaints filed by the various Sons of Confederate Veterans groups. We do not reach the question of whether Humphries has standing for her claim for damages under OCGA § 50-3-1, because the cause of action that statute purports to create has not yet arisen; by the statute’s terms, the cause of action arises only upon the occurrence of conduct prohibited by the statute, and that conduct has not yet occurred. Accordingly, we affirm the dismissal of Humphries’s statutory claim for damages and all claims by the Sons of Confederate Veterans groups, and reverse the dismissal of Humphries’s claim for injunctive relief.

(Mike Frisch)