Orders tolling the statute of limitations for civil cases during the pandemic's height applied across the board, the court ruled.
BOSTON (CN) — Massachusetts litigants facing down deadlines can rest a little easier after a Friday morning ruling from the state’s Supreme Judicial Court adopting a broad interpretation of its own orders tolling civil statutes of limitations during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The court issued orders regarding the tolling of statutes of limitations throughout the pandemic, opining that delays were justified by reduced access to the courts. In total, civil statutes of limitations in Massachusetts were tolled for 106 days, effectively stopping the clock from March 17 to June 30 of 2020.
In its Friday ruling on a personal injury case against a supermarket chain, the high court decided that the resulting 106-day grace period applied to all cases in the state.
The order affirmed a district court’s denial of the chain’s motion to dismiss customer Margarita Melendez’s suit against it alleging that she was knocked to the floor by a Sturbridge, Massachusetts, supermarket clerk wheeling a cart out of a storeroom at a Shaw’s Supermarkets location in 2017. The three-year statute of limitations would normally have expired on Sept. 3, 2020, but Melendez’s suit was filed on September 24.
Attorney Kristyn Kaupas of the Boston firm Kiernan Trebach argued on behalf of the grocer in April that cases whose filing deadline occurred after the conclusion...
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