Opinion ID: 2822008
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Pompa Exception

Text: “[T]his court has twice predicted that the Colorado Supreme Court would recognize narrow exceptions to [the complaint] rule.” United Fire & Cas. Co. v. Boulder Plaza Residential, LLC, 633 F.3d 951, 960 (10th Cir. 2011) (citing AIMCO v. Nutmeg Ins. Co., 593 F.3d 1188 (10th Cir. 2010), and Pompa, 520 F.3d 1139). Only the Pompa exception is relevant in this appeal. In Pompa, the insured caused the death of another man and later pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide. 520 F.3d at 1141. The decedent’s heirs subsequently named the insured, Mr. Pompa, as the defendant in a wrongful death action. Id. Mr. Pompa tendered the defense to his homeowner’s insurer, AFM. Id. AFM refused to defend, however, citing the criminal-conviction exclusion in Mr. Pompa’s policy. Id. In Mr. Pompa’s subsequent suit against AFM, he argued the complaint rule “precluded the court [and AFM] from considering his conviction for negligent homicide because the wrongful-death complaint did not -9- allege that he had been convicted of any crime.” Id. at 1142. After noting Colorado’s adherence to the complaint rule and the policy reasons for doing so, we observed that a number of courts and commentators recognized certain exceptions to the complaint rule: One widely recognized exception states that an insurer should not have a duty to defend an insured when the facts alleged in the complaint ostensibly bring the case within the policy’s coverage, but other facts that are not reflected in the complaint and are unrelated to the merits of the plaintiff’s action plainly take the case outside the policy coverage. Id. at 1147 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). While this exception had not been adopted by the Colorado Supreme Court, we expressed our view that it would embrace such an exception if faced with similar facts, so long as the policy reasons behind the complaint rule were not undermined. Id.; see United Fire, 633 F.3d at 960. We concluded that we could consider Mr. Pompa’s conviction, a fact extrinsic to the underlying complaint, because it was “an indisputable fact that is not an element of either the cause of action or a defense in the underlying litigation.” Pompa, 520 F.3d at 1147. Importantly, we found that consideration of this fact would neither defeat Mr. Pompa’s “legitimate expectations of . . . a defense,” nor prejudice his defense in the underlying wrongful death suit. Id. at 1147–48. With respect to Mr. Pompa’s expectation of a defense, we noted that “an insured can have no reasonable expectation of a defense when an indisputable fact, known to all parties, removes -10- the act in question from coverage.” Id. at 1148. More recently, in United Fire, we refused to broaden the scope of the exceptions to the complaint rule. Noting that neither the Colorado Supreme Court nor lower Colorado courts had ratified either of the exceptions recognized by this court, we concluded that further expansion of those exceptions was unwarranted. United Fire, 633 F.3d at 961. We therefore rejected a party’s request to expand the exceptions “to include consideration of extrinsic evidence not necessarily contained in another complaint, as long as the insurer had knowledge of such evidence when it denied coverage.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).