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In Brief:
Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously rejects jury trial right challenge.
Justice Jill Karofsky authors opinion upholding legislature’s immunity law.
Law grants health care providers immunity until 60 days post-pandemic emergency.
Case involves Savannah Wren’s 2023 malpractice suit over baby’s death.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument that a COVID-era law unconstitutionally removed a woman’s right to a jury trial in the death of her baby at Ascension Columbia St. Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee.
Attorneys for Savannah Wren, a Milwaukee resident, filed a medical malpractice complaint in 2023 against the hospital, alleging that doctors waited too long to induce labor and ignored signs that something was wrong as she neared her due date in May 2020.
But attorneys for Ascension pointed to a state law, passed about six weeks before Wren’s delivery, as proof the health system was not liable for the baby’s death. The law gave health care providers immunity against negligence lawsuits until 60 days after Wisconsin’s pandemic-related state of emergency ended.
State Supreme Court justices in June 2025 agreed to review whether the law violated Wren’s constitutional right to a jury trial. They heard oral arguments in October 2025, already appearing skeptical of the plaintiff’s argument.
In the court’s April 10 opinion, Justice Jill Karofsky wrote that Wisconsin’s constitution allows the state Legislature to alter or suspend some causes of action under common law, which lawmakers did in passing the immunity law. Without a cause of action, Karofsky wrote, there is no right to a jury trial.
Justices are returning the case to the Court of Appeals. Wren’s attorneys indicated during oral arguments that they could continue the case under a different legal argument if their initial approach was unsuccessful.
Wren’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment. An Ascension spokesperson said the health system does not comment on pending litigation but “extend(s) our deepest sympathies to the family on the loss of their child.”
Hospitals had broad immunity during pandemic’s early days
Wren’s case was among several around the country testing the power of pandemic-era laws that temporarily barred negligence lawsuits against doctors and health systems.
The laws were drawn up in response to the pandemic, which thrust the medical community – and the world – into chaos. But the reach of the laws ended up being broader, in many cases blocking challenges from patients like Wren whose hospital experiences were not related to contracting COVID-19.
Wren, who was 23 at the time and had Type II diabetes, sought care for her high-risk pregnancy from obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Jessica Hoelzle, who is named as a defendant along with Dr. Jordan Hauck, then a first-year OB-GYN resident whom Hoelzle supervised, according to court documents.
The complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 2023 details two occasions in which Wren visited her doctors with concerning symptoms and was sent home. When she arrived at the hospital on May 24, 2020, for a scheduled induction at 40 weeks and one day pregnant, a nurse was unable to detect her baby’s heart rate. After an emergency C-section, he was delivered and pronounced dead shortly after.
Doctors should have induced labor earlier due to Wren’s diabetes, the complaint alleges.
Guidance from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on pre-gestational diabetes in pregnancy says management beyond 40 weeks gestation “generally is not recommended.” But a spokesperson for the organization also pointed to guidance that decisions about timing of delivery “always should be individualized to the needs of the patient” in response to a November 2025 inquiry from the Journal Sentinel.
Attorneys for Columbia St. Mary’s said the hospital “denies that the allegations fully or accurately reflect the events” that happened on the days Wren was seen. The hospital was represented by Milwaukee firm Gutglass, Erickson, Larson and Schneider, S.C.
In the Supreme Court’s opinion, Karofsky called the circumstances of the baby’s death “heartbreaking.”
Case is a reminder of legislative power to change tort law
Alex Lemann, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School, said he was unsurprised by the court’s opinion.
Lemann said there are many examples over the last century of legislatures changing the common law of torts, which is the branch of law that focuses on remedying harms caused by wrongful actions.
A well-known example is worker’s compensation laws, which removed people’s right to sue their employers for negligence in exchange for automatically getting money to cover the cost of on-the-job injuries.
Karofsky wrote in the opinion that the court does not view Wren’s jury trial challenge any differently than the failed jury trial right challenges to Wisconsin’s Worker’s Compensation Act.
Lemann said that broadly, the case serves as a reminder to the public of the power of the state Legislature to make changes like this. The legislature has been enacting various forms of tort reform related to medical malpractice, he said – including this law, though its impact wanes as the early days of the pandemic slip further into the collective rearview.
It’s one more thing to consider when people decide whom to vote for to represent them in the statehouse.
“It’s easy for people to ignore that [responsibility of lawmakers]. It’s not something that affects them in their regular lives,” Lemann said. “But we never know when we’re going to be the victim of a medical mishap.”
