PEORIA, Ariz. — Editor's Note: The above video is from an earlier broadcast.
The Arizona Supreme Court has sided with a Peoria mother who has taken legal action against the city for not placing a crosswalk where her 12-year-old son was fatally hit by a vehicle in 2018.
Kizzen James sued the city after her son, Isaiah McGinnis, was killed while walking home from school near 77th and Peoria avenues.
"There’s other children who live in that area that do cross that street every single day,” James told 12News in 2018.
But the mother's lawsuit was dismissed in Maricopa County Superior Court over what appears to be a technicality.
In an opinion released Monday, the high court reversed the decision to dismiss James' lawsuit and remanded the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings.
The legal issue revolved around how much time James gave the city to initially respond to her notice of claim, which is a document plaintiffs serve before filing a lawsuit in court.
James stated in the claim that the city had 30 days to respond, but Arizona law actually gives defendants 60 days to issue a response. That discrepancy resulted in the lower courts siding with the city to dismiss James' lawsuit.
The Arizona Supreme Court decided the 30-day deadline stated in the claim was irrelevant since plaintiffs don't have the power to impose their own deadlines.
"Because James did not have the statutory or other legal authority to impose a shorter time for the City to respond, her attempt in the notice of claim to shorten the sixty-day deadline to thirty days had no effect," the opinion states.
The justices additionally highlighted how James did not file her lawsuit in court until six months after serving the notice of claim.
"For all these reasons, we conclude that James’ attempt to shorten the City’s statutory sixty-day response deadline in her notice of claim was a legal nullity that did not invalidate her notice of claim," the justices wrote in their opinion.
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