Court Opinion

ID: 9577052
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:31:13.701933+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:19:53.149162
License: Public Domain

Fletcher, Justice,
concurring.
As a result of a check-kiting scheme, Citizens suffered a loss of $460,000. Citizens seeks to recover this loss from its insurance broker, Saunders, Stuckey & Mullís, Inc. (SS&M) for having failed to obtain *457coverage for the loss. Citizens had previously taken an assignment of a $605,460.02 judgment obtained against Talmadge Stuckey, a perpetrator of the scheme, by First Union, the scheme’s primary victim. Citizens financed the payment of the Stuckey judgment and then filed a satisfaction of the judgment. The question in this case is whether the filing of a satisfaction of judgment against one of two wrongdoers operates as the single satisfaction permitted under OCGA § 9-2-4 and thus bars the suit against the other wrongdoer.
Decided June 12, 1995.
Weissman, Nowack, Curry & Zaleon, Linda B. Foster, Frances R. Mathis, for appellant.
William S. Stone, Thomas E. Sasser III, for appellee.
I agree with the majority that Citizens’s suit against SS&M is barred. Citizens has acknowledged “full payment and satisfaction of’ the judgment against Stuckey. Citizens’s decision to finance the payment of Stuckey’s judgment to it and to accept unsecured promissory notes as “full payment” does not change the legal effect of the satisfaction of judgment. Citizens’s suit against SS&M is for the same loss represented by the judgment against Stuckey, which Citizens has marked “satisfied.” Therefore, Citizens’s suit is barred by the satisfaction of the earlier judgment.
I am authorized to state that Chief Justice Hunt joins in this concurrence.