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Strait v. Treasurer

The Missouri Supreme Court recently expanded on its 2007 holding in Schoemehl v. Treasurer of the State of Missouri that the surviving dependents of a dead employee can continue to collect workers’ compensation, despite Missouri statutory law stating that benefits should be paid only “during the continuance of such disability for the lifetime of the employee...” In 2008, the Missouri General Assembly abrogated Schoemehl to clarify that permanent total disability benefits must expire upon the injured employee’s unrelated death.

On July 15, 2008, Chief Justice Stith, writing for the court, held in Strait v. Treasurer of Missouri that Missouri must provide disability benefits to deceased employees’ dependents, even if the dead employee’s claim is still pending at the time of the employee’s death.

Rosalyn Strait was injured on the job in August 2002. On January 12, 2007, the Labor and Industrial Relations Commission (“Commission”) awarded Ms. Strait permanent disability benefits for life. On January 27, 2007, Ms. Strait died of injuries unrelated to her work accident. The Commission dismissed Ms. Strait’s children’s claim to Ms. Strait’s disability benefits for “lack of jurisdiction.”

On appeal, the Supreme Court held that because the Strait children’s case was still pending when Schoemehl issued, the Schoemehl decision applied to the Strait children’s case. The court reversed the Commission’s decision and remanded the case to grant benefits to the Strait children as of the date of Ms. Strait’s death.

In dissent, Judge Stephen Limbaugh explains that Schoemehl holds that the disability payments are not tied to the employee’s death, but continue to the employee’s dependents, who are then themselves considered the employees. “But if that is true,” Limbaugh reasoned, “there is no basis to tie the payments in this case to the fact that the employee died while the case was still pending.”

Jarrett v. Jones

On July 29, 2008, Patricia Breckinridge, writing for the Missouri Supreme Court, held that an automobile driver negligently inflicted emotional distress on a fellow motorist when the unconscious driver allowed the other motorist to view the dead body of the driver’s child. This holding expanded the Missouri cause of action for negligent infliction of emotional distress.

On June 8, 2004, Defendant Michael Jones was traveling westbound on Interstate 44 with his wife and two daughters. Mr. Jones lost control of his vehicle on the wet road, and collided with Plaintiff Tommy R. Jarrett’s truck. Mr. Jarrett rushed to Mr. Jones’s vehicle to check on the occupants, and saw the body of Mr. Jones’s two-year-old daughter, Makayla, who had died in the collision. In addition to physical injuries caused by the collision, Mr. Jarrett claimed that the accident caused him “post-traumatic stress disorder, past wage and income loss, past pain and suffering, anxiety, emotional trauma, and stress.”

Under Missouri law, bystanders who observe an injury to a third party caused by a defendant’s negligence can recover for emotional distress only if the bystander is “placed in a reasonable fear of physical injury to his or her own person.” Accordingly, the trial court granted summary judgment for Mr. Jones because: (1) Mr. Jarrett was a bystander who was no longer in the “zone of danger” when he viewed Makayla’s death, and (2) as Mr. Jones was injured and unconscious, Mr. Jones owed no duty to prevent Mr. Jarrett from viewing Makayla’s body.

The supreme court reversed, holding that Mr. Jones was not merely a bystander, as his truck had collided with the Jones’s car. While acknowledging that a plaintiff may experience emotional distress from an accident and separate emotional distress from viewing the harm to third parties as a result of the accident, the majority held that a plaintiff’s emotional distress caused by the accident itself is “generally inseparable” from the emotional distress caused by observing a third-party’s injuries.

Mr. Jones admitted that he suffered no emotional distress from the accident, but only from the subsequent viewing of Makayla’s body. Yet, the court found that that Mr. Jones’s “admissions demonstrate that the grief and distress [plaintiff] experienced were a result of his participation in the accident that killed [the child], and not simply from viewing her body.”

Judge Limbaugh noted in dissent “the sad irony that the party to this action who is most subject to emotional distress—the father who lost his child—is the party being sued for having caused emotional distress to a stranger who merely saw the child.” The dissent also worried that the majority’s criterion for distinguishing between a “direct victim” and a “bystander” would produce illogical outcomes in future cases.

* Jennifer Wolsing is a litigation associate in St. Louis, Missouri. She graduated summa cum laude from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2007 and earned her Ph.D. in analytic philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2005. Her dissertation was entitled “Free At Last: A Libertarian Defense of Free Will.”

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