EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The New Mexico Supreme Court clarified the legal protections that state law provides to 911 dispatchers and the government agencies that employ them from being sued for damages for personal injuries or deaths allegedly caused by their response to a call for help.
The state Supreme Court issued the ruling on Monday, April 21, in a case involving a 16-year-old who suffered heatstroke while hiking in the Organ Mountains and died in 2020.
The court unanimously concluded that the state Enhanced Medical Services Act (EMSA) governed the liability issue and that 911 dispatchers were immune from civil liability except for damages caused by negligence, according to a news release sent out by the Office of the state Supreme Court.
The family sued the Mesilla Valley Regional Dispatch Authority, several of its dispatchers, the Doña Ana County Board of County Commissioners, the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and the city of Las Cruces.
The lawsuit alleged that the teenager’s death was caused by unreasonable delays and missteps in the emergency response, including an initial referral of the incident to a fire prevention specialist, a mischaracterization of it as a search-and-rescue situation and “minor medical” event, and two ambulances being dispatched and then cancelled.
Another state law – the Enhanced 911 Act – “has no relevance” in determining the liability of dispatchers for allegedly mishandling emergency medical calls, the court wrote in an opinion by Justice Michael E. Vigil.
The court issued its opinion in response to a federal court’s request about the liability of 911 dispatchers under state law. The federal court posed the question in helping it resolve the family’s lawsuit.
The New Mexico Supreme Court analyzed two state laws to determine the scope of immunity provided to 911 dispatchers.
It is the federal court’s responsibility to apply the law to the facts of the family’s wrongful death claims, the state Supreme Court said in its news release.
The governmental defendants in the case argued that the Enhanced 911 Act applied to dispatchers and provided immunity for dispatchers and their employers from damage claims other than those based on “intentional acts.”
They pointed to a section of the law that granted such immunity to governmental agencies, employees, equipment suppliers and certain others for damages “from installing, maintaining or providing enhanced 911 systems or transmitting 911 calls,” according to the news release.
The defendants contended that the section included emergency 911 medical dispatchers.
The court rejected the defendants’ arguments that the statutory reference to “transmitting 911 calls” made dispatchers subject to the immunity under the Enhanced 911 Act, which was enacted six years after the EMSA became law.
“Succinctly stated, important changes in statutory law are not generally made through inconspicuous means. Applying that principle here, we cannot conclude that the Legislature would announce a new rule more broadly immunizing 911 dispatchers from liability except for intentional acts in the space of one phrase in a statute primarily addressing enhanced 911 infrastructure and funding that makes only isolated and generalized references to 911 dispatchers or their equivalents,” the court wrote.
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