§ 9-3-90.Individuals under disability or imprisoned when cause of action accrues

Two groups of people get a break on Georgia’s ordinary filing deadlines under this statute: individuals who are legally incompetent because of intellectual disability or mental illness at the moment their claim arises, and minors under 18. For both groups, the clock does not start ticking on the day the injury or wrong occurs. Instead, the statute waits until the disability ends — the person turns 18, or the intellectual disability or mental illness is removed — and only then gives that person the same amount of time to sue that anyone else would have had from the original date of accrual.

That means a five-year-old hurt by a careless driver does not lose her right to sue on her fifth birthday plus two years; she gets the full limitations period starting from her eighteenth birthday. The rule protects people who could not reasonably have filed suit on their own during the disability, without erasing the deadline altogether — it relocates the starting line instead.

Subsection (b) carries an exception: O.C.G.A. § 9-3-33.1 controls certain claims involving minors, so this general tolling rule steps aside where that more specific statute applies.

The statute also carries a leftover transitional rule from 1984, when the General Assembly narrowed how imprisonment tolled limitations periods. It keeps the 1984 change from reviving claims already time-barred before July 1, 1984, and it gave anyone whose claim would newly become barred under the 1984 rules an extra year — until July 1, 1985 — to file. That piece of the statute is historical now, tied to a one-time transition rather than an ongoing rule.