Opinion ID: 1670701
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: shiver v. sessions

Text: In Shiver, four surviving minor children brought a wrongful death action against the estate of their stepfather, who had shot and killed their mother and then killed himself. The trial judge dismissed the suit, finding the plaintiffs barred from maintaining suit for the wrongful death of their mother as interspousal immunity would have prevented her from maintaining an action against their stepfather. This Court reversed, characterizing the interspousal immunity defense as personal to the decedent, not inhering in her husband's tortious act, and therefore incapable of barring the plaintiffs' independent right of action for wrongful death: Thus, it is settled law in this jurisdiction that the wife's disability to sue her husband for his tort is personal to her, and does not inhere in the tort itself. The tortious injury to the wife does not cease to be an unlawful act, though the law exempts the husband from liability for the damage. It is also well settled that our Wrongful Death Act creates in the named beneficiaries an entirely new cause of action, in an entirely new right, for the recovery of damages suffered by them, not the decedent, as a consequence of the wrongful invasion of their legal right by the tort-feasor. This right is separate, distinct and independent from that which might have been sued upon by the injured person, had he or she lived. 80 So.2d at 908 (citations omitted). Relying heavily on this distinction, the Second District in Alley allowed a wrongful death action against a rental car company to proceed despite the fact that the decedent would have been unable to maintain an action as a co-bailee of the subject rental car. The decedent in Alley was killed in a single vehicle accident when her husband fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the rental car into a guard rail. The decedent's husband and two minor children, who were also passengers in the automobile, survived. The Alley court rejected the rental company's claim that the wrongful death action on behalf of the surviving children was barred given that the decedent was a co-bailee of the rental vehicle, [7] explaining: It is eminently clear to us, as stated by then Justice Ehrlich in his concurring opinion in Perkins, that a wrongful death action is not derivative, but it is remedial and should be construed to fulfill its remedial function. The Wrongful Death Act has been consistently held to create an entirely new and independent cause of action and an entirely new right in the statutory beneficiaries. If a wrongful death action is not derivative, what then under the Wrongful Death Act is the nature of a decedent's rights, if the decedent survived, that will either permit or preclude the survivors' action? Shiver seems to be the seminal case that provides the best answer to that question. The answer depends on whether, at the time of the decedent's death, there existed, had the decedent survived, either a cause of action or a right of action that would support an action for damages for the injuries of the decedent that resulted in death. If a cause of action would have existed, even if the right of action were extinguished, the survivors' wrongful death action survives. The cases relied upon by appellant to prevent a survivor's action all seem to turn on the fact that the  cause of action was barred or had been satisfied or eliminated so that it no longer existed. The lack of the ability to sue in that instance inheres in the tort itself. On the other hand, the survivor's right of action is not lost where the viability of the tort so as to support a  cause of action is not dissipated, but only a  right of action in the decedent has been lost because of a disability to sue which is personal to the decedent and does not inhere in the tort or cause of action upon which the survivor's separate right of action is premised. Id. at 274. Consistent with Alley the petitioner contends that the decedent's co-bailee status, like the defense of interspousal immunity confronted in Shiver, is best characterized as a disability to sue personal to the decedent and therefore incapable of precluding survivors from maintaining an action for wrongful death. This argument, however, overlooks the genesis of the distinction drawn in Shiver. At the heart of the distinction drawn in Shiver was this Court's recognition that the policies engendered by interspousal immunity were of no moment in the action for wrongful death: This is especially true in view of the fact that the reason for the rule of marital immunity automatically disappears from the picture simultaneously with the accrual of the right of action under the Wrongful Death Act. As stated in Welch v. Davis [, 410 Ill. 130, 101 N.E.2d 547 (1951)], supra, An immunity based upon the preservation of marital harmony can have no pertinence in this case, for here the marriage has been terminated, husband and wife are both dead, and the action is brought for the benefit of a third person. 80 So.2d at 908; see also Toombs, 762 So.2d at 1043 (Harris, J., concurring specially). [8] Similar policy concerns are not implicated by a consideration of the decedent's co-bailee status. Moreover, we have revisited the distinction drawn in Shiver between disabilities to sue personal to the decedent and defenses inhering in the cause of action on only one occasion. See Dressler v. Tubbs, 435 So.2d 792 (Fla. 1983). Significantly, in Dressler we were again grappling with the role of interspousal immunity in an action for wrongful death. In Dressler a husband and wife were killed in the crash of a plane piloted by the husband. The personal representative of the wife's estate brought suit on behalf of the estate and the wife's heirs against her husband's estate to the extent of available liability insurance coverage on the aircraft. The trial court dismissed the suit, holding that it was barred by the doctrines of interspousal and interfamily tort immunity. On appeal, the Fifth District reversed and we approved their decision on the strength of Shiver. See Dressler, 435 So.2d at 793-94. [9] Indeed, our most recent inquiries into the wrongful death right of action confirm Shiver and Dressler's status as a sport in this Court's wrongful death jurisprudence crafted to address the vagaries inherent in an application of interspousal immunity to bar an action for wrongful death, but illsuited for general application to the consideration of wrongful death actions. [10] This Court's post- Shiver determination of whether a right of action for wrongful death attached in the statutory survivors has focused on the existence of a right of action in the decedent at his or her death, not the distinction between personal disabilities to sue and defenses inhering in the underlying cause of action which guided our inquiry in Shiver.