Court Opinion

ID: 9791870
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:19:40.853353+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:39.096374
License: Public Domain

Fontron, J.,
dissenting: I agree with Justices Fatzer and Kaul that the judgment of the district court should be reversed, and desire to elaborate briefly on my reasons for doing so.
First, it should be said, in all candor, that the statute involved in this lawsuit, K. S. A. 44-556 (now K. S. A. 1970 Supp.) would have difficulty in qualifying as a model for lucid legislation. Its present provisions, if literally applied, would largely cancel each other.
The statute deals with appeals. So far as the issue presently before the court is concerned, the forepart of the statute provides in essence that an appeal from the decision of the director to the district court shall be taken by filing written notice of appeal with the director within twenty days after his decision is filed. In 1961 the statute was amended by two provisos, the first of which is to the effect that no compensation shall be due or payable until the expiration of the twenty-day appeal period, and then payment of past-due compensation shall not be payable if within the twenty-day period notice of appeal is filed, and the right to appeal shall include the right to make no payments of compensation until the appeal is decided by the district court, if the employer carries insurance, or is a self-insurer and has filed a bond with the court.
The foregoing proviso would present no major difficulty were it not for subsequent provisions contained in the second proviso of the 1961 amendment, which immediately follows the first, to the effect that perfection of an appeal from the director’s decision to the district court shall not stay payment of compensation due for the ten-week period next preceding the director’s decision and for the period of time after the director’s decision and prior to the district court’s determination of the appeal.
*165This court has never been confronted with the precise problem presented in this case, where the contradictory character of the two provisos is called into question. Here, the employer perfected its appeal six days after filing notice of appeal with the director. One day later the workman made demand under 44-512a for compensation claimed to be due and payable. It will be observed that both the filing of the appeal by the employer and the demand of the workman were effected some two weeks prior to expiration of the twenty-day period within which the employer could have perfected its appeal.
In Hunter v. General Motors Corporation, 202 Kan. 166, 446 P. 2d 838, (cited by the court in support of its opinion) the claimant, not the employer, filed notice of appeal with the director four days after the director’s decision was filed, and on the same day made demand under 44-512a for compensation allegedly due and owing under the director’s award. Under those circumstances this court said the demand under 44-512a was premature and ineffectual. Similar language is found, by way of dicta, in Kissick v. Salina Manufacturing Co., Inc., 204 Kan. 849, 466 P. 2d 344, (also cited by the court as authority) where the workman moved to dismiss the employer’s appeal from the director’s decision for the reason that the employer had failed to pay compensation alleged to be due and owing.
On a factual basis the present case may be distinguished easily from both Hunter and Kissick. Here, the employer has appealed— not the workman, as in Hunter. Moreover, the action here is to recover past-due compensation under 44-512a; it is not a proceeding to dismiss an appeal for failure to pay past-due compensation, as in Kissick.
The court, in its decision, recognizes the import of the first proviso of the 1961 amendment but entirely ignores the second proviso, which is to the effect that the perfection of an appeal to district court shall not stay payment of compensation due for the ten-week period immediately preceding the director’s decision and for the period after such decision until the district court determines the appeal. In my opinion the second proviso of the 1961 amendment should be given effect in conjunction with the twenty-day appeal period specified in the first proviso, if that be possible, as I think it is.
Certain rules have become well established in the field of statutory *166construction. One of the cardinal principles is that in the interpretation of statutes the legislative intent is to be ascertained and the general policy and purpose underlying them shall be given effect. (See cases in 5 Hatcher’s Kansas Digest [Rev. Ed.] Statutes, §§71, 73.)
This court has said on more than one occasion that where a statute is susceptible to more than one construction it must be given that construction which, when considered in its entirety, gives expression to its intent and purpose, even though such construction is not within the strict literal interpretation of the act. (Shumaker v. Kansas State Labor Dept., 154 Kan. 418, 118 P. 2d 550; State v. Sumner, 169 Kan. 516, 219 P. 2d 438; Barten v. Turkey Creek Watershed Joint District No. 32, 200 Kan. 489, 438 P. 2d 732.) We have also held it to be the court’s duty to reconcile the different provisions of a statute, insofar as the same is practicable, to make them consistent, harmonious and sensible. (State ex rel., v. Moore, 154 Kan. 193, 117 P. 2d 598; Harris v. Shanahan, 192 Kan. 629, 390 P. 2d 772.)
As I read the two provisos, and construing them in relation to each other, I cannot escape the conviction that they were enacted with two objectives in mind: First, to give an employer in a workmen’s compensation action a sufficient period of time, defined as being 20 days, in which to perfect an appeal from the director’s decision without becoming subject to the hazard of a valid 44-512a motion being served upon him for past-due compensation; and second, that from and after the date on which the employer perfects his appeal, even though that date be prior to the expiration of the twenty-day period, the statutory purpose of the twenty-day period has been served, and the employer should pick up the tab for payments of compensation thereafter becoming due under the director’s decision as well as those payments due for the ten-week period next preceding the director’s decision. Such, I believe, can rationally be said to have been the intent of the legislature in enacting the two adjacent provisos.
The natural function of a proviso is to modify, restrict or limit that which immediately precedes it. (See 50 Am. Jur., Statutes, § 438, p. 459.) In the case now before this court, the words “Provided, however,” are found at the beginning of the second proviso. Where such is the language introducing a proviso, the New York court in Millard v. McFadden, 185 Misc. 771, 57 N. Y. S. 2d 594, said that the word “provided” expresses a limitation or exception *167and the word “however” is added confirmation of the intention to qualify what precedes the proviso. In Matter of Livingston, 14 A. D. 2d 264, 220 N. Y. S. 2d 434, the court expresses the sense of the phrase in this fashion:
“. . . According to the general rules for statutory construction, the words provided, however’, are deemed to denote the expression of a limitation or exception. . . .” (p. 265.)
An interpretation giving effect to both provisos, I believe, was foreshadowed in this court’s opinion in Scammahorn v. Gibraltar Savings & Loan Assn., 195 Kan. 220, 404 P. 2d 165. In that case the court called attention to the 1961 amendment to 44-556 and said:
“In the same enactment that amended 44-556, the legislature also amended 44-512a by changing the period of time the statutory demand could be served from fourteen days to twenty days, so as to make the time within which to serve the demand and the time to appeal to the district court from an award of compensation to be coextensive. Previously, an employer found himself served with a 44-512a demand for payment, although the time in which he could appeal to the district court had not expired. The obvious purpose of this amendment was to make the period of time in which an employer might appeal to be coextensive with the time in which demand under 44-512a could be served, and thus remove the hiatus between those times which previously existed.
“Likewise, it is obvious the legislature intended by its amendment to 44-556 that if an employer was insured for workmen’s compensation liability, or if he was a self-insurer and had filed a bond with the district court pursuant to 44-530, he was relieved of payment of compensation during the first twenty days after the entry of the award if, within such twenty-day period, he perfected an appeal to the district court. However, the legislature also intended that if such an employer perfected an appeal to the district court, he was not relieved of payment of compensation due for the ten-week period next preceding the director’s decision and of additional payments in accordance with the terms of the award until the district court rendered its decision on the appeal. If an, employer failed to make payment of compensation after his appeal was perfected, the legislature further intended that a statutory demand under 44-512a could be served.” (pp. 223, 224.) (Emphasis supplied.)
In summation, it is my view that effect can be given to both provisos of the 1961 amendment without doing too great violence to the language of either. The appeal here was perfected by the employer prior to expiration of the twenty-day period delineated in the first proviso. It is my thought that from and after the date of the appeal, compensation for the ten weeks immediately preceding the director’s award would be due and that future payments of *168compensation would become due, in accordance with the director’s award, until the appeal was finally determined by the district court.
In concluding this dissent, and without meaning to be at all presumptious, it occurs to me that clarification of the statute under consideration would prove helpful.
Fatzer and ICaul, JJ., join in the foregoing dissent.