Opinion ID: 2363601
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: issues cognizable within petition for further compensation

Text: The WCC relied upon Dufault v. Midland-Ross of Canada, Ltd., Me., 380 A.2d 200, 205 (1977), in dismissing the employee's Petition for Further Compensation. Its reliance thereon represents a misapplication of the holding in Dufault. [2] Not addressed within Dufault was the question of what issues are cognizable in an employee's Petition for Further Compensation. We are presented in the instant case with the question of whether an employee may petition for further compensation on the basis of an injury not described within an approved agreement for compensation because then unknown but which ultimately arose out of the same occurrence. Addressing that same issue, we stated in Devoe's Case, 131 Me. 452, 163 A. 789 (1933): The intent of this statutory provision [3] is to permit the making by the parties of a settlement discontinuing compensation, or the entry of a decree to the same effect without thereby foreclosing the right of the employee to recover further compensation if he suffers a recurrence of trouble due to the injury, or if it is discovered that compensatory injury exists, which, at the time the final decree was entered, was unknown to the parties and therefore not considered by the Commission. . . . Such purpose is in accord with the liberal aim of the statute, which seeks on the broadest principles to provide a just recompense for those injured in industrial accidents. 131 Me. 454-55, 163 A. 790 (emphasis supplied). In Devoe's Case the parties, on October 22, 1929, had executed an agreement for compensation which described the September 25, 1929 injury as a fractured rib. On November 19, 1930 the employer presented a petition for review of the employee's incapacity, and the Commission found the employee's incapacity resulting from the described injury to have ended as of September 6, 1930, and decreed that compensation payments shall cease as of said date. 131 Me. at 453, 163 A. at 789. On May 10, 1932 the employee filed a petition for further compensation in which he asserted injuries to his internal organs arising out of the accident of September 25, 1929. This court held the petition to be proper and not foreclosed by the earlier agreement and termination of compensation for the injury described therein. 131 Me. 452, 163 A. 789. The rule of Devoe's Case has also been applied when another Petition for Further Compensation intervenes between the agreement for compensation and a Petition for Further Compensation that lists additional injuries not previously listed in the agreement or petition nor considered by the Commission. In Lynch v. Jutras, 136 Me. 18, 21-22, 1 A.2d 221, 223 (1938), the rule [4] was declared to be: [W]here an employee is in fact injured in some way other than that known to him and is awarded compensation simply for the known injury, a decree for such will not conclude him in a later petition for further compensation on account of a previously unknown compensatory injury. . .. Only that decided as to the known injury [is] res adjudicata. In dismissing [5] the employee's Petition for Further Compensation in the instant case the WCC failed to consider the long-established rule of Devoe's Case and its own mandate to construe the compensation act liberally. See generally 39 M.R.S.A. § 92. The entries are: Appeal denied as to Petition for Award of Compensation. Appeal sustained as to Petition for Further Compensation. Pro forma decree of the Superior Court affirming the dismissal of the Petition for Further Compensation vacated. Case remanded to the Superior Court for remand to the Workers Compensation Commission for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It is further ordered that the employer pay to the employee an allowance for counsel fees in the amount of $550, together with his reasonable out-of-pocket expenses for this appeal. McKUSICK, C. J., and DELAHANTY, J., did not sit.