New Mexico Supreme Court clarifies 911 dispatcher immunity from lawsuits

Yahoo

21-04-2025

A view of the Organ Mountains and surrounding desert in Doña Ana County on Sunday, April 7, 2024. (Photo by Leah Romero for Source NM)
New Mexico's highest court on Monday clarified a question posed by a federal court about which law to consider when weighing an emergency dispatcher's legal immunity from allegations of a mishandled 911 call.
The ruling stems from the death of a 16-year-old boy who was hiking with his family in July 2020 in the Organ Mountains in Doña Ana County when he started suffering from heat stroke. His mother called 911, which a Mesilla Valley Regional Dispatch Authority 911 dispatcher answered and then routed to the New Mexico Department of Public Safety.
In a wrongful death lawsuit, the child's estate and family alleged that the Mesilla Valley dispatcher made a series of missteps that delayed the emergency medical response, and that DPS' dispatch center incorrectly noted their location that day.
The Mesilla Valley Regional Dispatch Authority and DPS each asked the judge to dismiss the case, pointing to a New Mexico law called the Enhanced 911 Act that provides legal immunity to local governments and their contractors who run 911 dispatch systems 'except for intentional acts.'
The federal court delayed a decision to dismiss the case and asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to weigh in.
In a unanimous decision published on Monday, the New Mexico Supreme Court found that the Enhanced 911 Act, 'has no bearing on the 911 dispatchers' immunity from liability for the allegedly mishandled 911 emergency medical calls.'
Instead, the justices wrote, immunity for dispatchers is governed by a law the Legislature passed six years prior to the Enhanced 911 Act: the Enhanced Medical Services Act, which provides immunity for dispatchers except for damages caused by negligence.
'Succinctly stated, important changes in statutory law are not generally made through inconspicuous means,' the justices wrote. '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 justices wrote that their ruling is only meant to clarify for the federal court which law to apply; they made no findings as to how it should apply the law to the boy's death.
Under a new statewide emergency dispatch system expected to launch in August, dispatchers won't have to rely on callers to determine their location and instead will be able to track the cell phone's location data.
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