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In the Supreme Court of Georgia

Decided: February 3, 2026

S25D0723, S25A0986. NBCUNIVERSAL MEDIA, LLC v.
WALKER et al.

MCMILLIAN, Justice.

After NBCUniversal Media, LLC (“NBCU”) failed to timely

answer a summons of continuing garnishment, a default judgment

in excess of $500,000 was entered against it even though NBCU

asserts that if it had timely answered or had tried to open the default

sooner, it would have owed less than $1,000. NBCU tried to set aside

the default judgment under OCGA § 9-11-60(d)(3), raising both

facial and as-applied constitutional challenges to Georgia’s

continuing garnishment default statute, OCGA § 18-4-43(a), 1 under

1 This statute provides that,

[w]hen a garnishee fails or refuses to file a garnishee answer at
least once every 45 days, such garnishee shall automatically be in
default. The default may be opened as provided in Code Section 18-
4-21. If the case is still in default after the expiration of the period
the due process clauses of the federal and Georgia constitutions and

the Georgia Constitution’s Excessive Fines Clause. In response, the

garnishor, Hevekiah Walker, argued that NBCU cannot show that

a nonamendable defect appears on the face of the record or

pleadings, see OCGA § 9-11-60(d)(3), and that the garnishment

default statute does not violate these constitutional provisions. After

the trial court denied the motion in a summary order, NBCU filed a

discretionary application in this Court, which was granted.

“It is incumbent upon this Court to inquire into its own

jurisdiction.” Jenkins v. State, 284 Ga. 642, 642 (2008) (citations and

punctuation omitted). This case is before us pursuant to our

exclusive appellate jurisdiction of “all cases in which the

constitutionality of a law … has been drawn in question.” Ga. Const.

1983, Art. VI, Sec. VI, Par. II(1). For a constitutional question to fall

of 15 days, judgment by default may be entered at any time
thereafter against such garnishee for the amount remaining due
on the judgment obtained against the defendant as shown in the
plaintiff’s affidavit of continuing garnishment.

OCGA § 18-4-43(a).
2
within the jurisdiction of this Court, such an issue must also be

raised before the trial court, distinctly ruled upon by that court, and

enumerated as error on appeal. See Barzey v. City of Cuthbert, 295

Ga. 641, 643 (2014). We have held that the distinct ruling

requirement may be met by necessary implication, including by

summary ruling that necessarily must have passed on the

constitutional question raised in order to reach the ruling. See

Wilkes & McHugh, P.A. v. LTC Consulting, L.P., 306 Ga. 252, 256–

57 (2019) (concluding that the Court of Appeals properly transferred

the case to this Court based on plaintiffs’ constitutional challenge,

“which the trial court implicitly rejected in denying the defendants’

motion”); Rouse v. Dep’t of Nat. Res., 271 Ga. 726, 728 (1999)

(jurisdiction was proper in this Court despite lack of explicit trial

court ruling on constitutional challenges to statute where “the trial

court must necessarily have rejected each of those issues to affirm

the administrative decision”).

Here, the trial court’s summary order does not distinctly or

necessarily rule on the constitutional challenges because it is

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possible that the trial court denied the motion to set aside based on

Walker’s argument that NBCU has failed to show a nonamendable

defect which appears on the face of the record or pleadings as

required by OCGA § 9-11-60(d)(3). In fact, Walker specifically

argued at the hearing on the motion that the trial court did not need

to reach the novel constitutional questions by resolving the motion

based on the statutory issue.

As a distinct ruling on a properly raised constitutional issue is

a requirement for invoking this Court’s jurisdiction, and seeing no

other basis for our jurisdiction, we conclude that this Court lacked

jurisdiction to grant NBCU’s discretionary application in Case No.

S25D0723. See City of Decatur v. DeKalb County, 284 Ga. 434, 436

(2008) (“When the appellate record fails to show that the trial court

ruled on the constitutional question, this Court is without

jurisdiction of an appeal in which this Court’s exclusive appellate

jurisdiction of constitutional issues is invoked, and the appeal is

transferred to the Court of Appeals.”). Accordingly, we vacate the

grant of the discretionary application in Case No. S25D0723,

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transfer the application to the Court of Appeals, and dismiss this

appeal. See id.

Prior judgment granting application vacated and application
transferred in Case No. S25D0723. Appeal dismissed in Case No.
S25A0986. All the Justices concur.

5
PETERSON, Chief Justice, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court in full. I write separately to

explain what the current version of the garnishment default

judgment statute allows, and why the General Assembly should

consider amending the statute.

A frivolous lawsuit is filed against a judgment-proof defendant

who doesn’t bother to respond; the defendant’s failure to respond

results in a default judgment for tens or hundreds of millions of

dollars. That judgment, of course, is not worth even the paper it’s

printed on as to the assetless defendant against whom it was

rendered. But the plaintiff can then send out hundreds or even

thousands of garnishments to large companies with lots of assets

(and no connection to the defendant) in hopes that one of them

makes a simple mistake and drops the ball on responding. The

plaintiff has now manufactured an eight- or nine-figure windfall

from the deep pockets of a company whose only fault was a failure

to return paperwork timely.

If this all seems a bit overdramatic, this isn’t just a

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hypothetical. The Attorney General gave this precise warning in an

amicus brief in a similar case here last year involving a tardy

garnishee with zero assets of the defendant and nevertheless hit

with a $20 million default judgment. Amicus Brief of Attorney

General at 25–28, RBC Global Asset Mgmt. (U.S.), Inc. v. Lattimore,

320 Ga. 77 (2024). The Attorney General acknowledged that using

the garnishment default judgment statute to “entrap unwary third

parties” rather than to simply locate a judgment debtor’s funds

“would raise a host of ethical, as well as constitutional questions.”

Id. at 10. Even so, we resolved that case on the merits of the

statutory arguments presented, so we did not reach the merits of the

constitutional challenges. See RBC Global Asset Mgmt., 320 Ga. at

79 n.3. Similarly, here, we are unable to reach the constitutional

arguments presented by NBCU. So we have now at least twice failed

to reach very serious constitutional arguments against certain

applications of the garnishment default judgment statute. See id.

I agree with the Attorney General: the garnishment default

judgment statute is on questionable constitutional footing, at least

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as to the Excessive Fines Clause of the Georgia Constitution. See

Ga. Const. of 1983, Art. I, Sec. I., Par. XVII. Our inability to reach

the merits of the constitutional issues should not be understood as

discounting their seriousness. And it appears that the problematic

applications of the garnishment default judgment statute may be

increasing.2

We will have to decide the constitutional questions eventually,

unless the General Assembly revises the statute to place some

meaningful cap on the amount of possible default judgments relative

to the judgment debtor’s assets held by the defaulting party. It is

appropriate to impose a penalty on the failure to respond timely to

a garnishment; the problem is not the existence of a penalty, but the

immense potential magnitude of the penalty the statute currently

2 This Court has recently denied applications for interlocutory or
discretionary appeal in at least two cases involving garnishment default
judgments. See Reedy Branch Lodge, Inc. v. Nutrien AG Solutions, Inc., Case
No. S23D1114 (Aug. 4, 2023) (denying application for discretionary appeal
from trial court order denying a motion to set aside a $500,000 garnishment
default judgment); Cheston-Thornton v. Allstate Financial Services, LLC, Case
No. S21I0278 (Oct. 29, 2020) (denying application for interlocutory appeal from
trial court order granting motion to set aside a $1 billion garnishment default
judgment).
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imposes. The General Assembly should seriously consider

addressing it.

I am authorized to state that Presiding Justice Warren and

Justice Bethel, Justice LaGrua, and Justice Colvin join in this

concurrence.