Court Opinion

ID: 9752167
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 17:40:47.907868+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:08.757030
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
I concur in the decision of the Court, and will offer a couple of observations in the interests of the progress of the law. The defendant here, Thomas Young, was tried and convicted of murder. The facts are that he entered a hardware store in Philadelphia with a revolver in his hand. He pointed it at the proprietor, Milton Danzig, and ordered him to give him the money in the cash register. As soon as the robbery had been accomplished and Young had disappeared, Danzig went to the telephone to call the police. While telephoning, he collapsed and died a half hour later. Three medical experts testified that Danzig’s death was the result of the shock and fright he sustained during the holdup.
*364Young did not fire the revolver, he did not strike Danzig with it, but its appearance and the manner in which he handled it was enough to kill Danzig. Because of this, Young was convicted of murder in the first degree — and properly so. If this Court will affirm, and it does so affirm, the proposition that a person may be responsible criminally for the harm he inflicts on another, even though he does not touch that other person, why should a person also not be liable in civil court in damages for injuries inflicted on another, even though there is no physical contact between the two persons?
Nothing can more diminish respect for law and confidence in the courts than some flagrant inconsistency which is obvious to the person on the street. In Bosley v. Andrews, 393 Pa. 161, a bull pursued Mrs. Bosley and although it did not come close enough to gore her with his horns, he did approach sufficiently to frighten her to the extent that she collapsed and suffered a heart attack. She sued the owner of the bull, but this Court held that since the bull did not actually touch her, there could be no recovery. This Court said: “The rule is long and well established in Pennsylvania that there can be no recovery of damages for injuries resulting from fright or nervous shock or mental or emotional disturbances or distress, unless they are accompanied by physical injury or physical impact.”
Isn’t it time to change that rule? If one can be held guilty of first degree murder when he does not lay a finger on his victim or touch him with any inanimate object, why shouldn’t the person who so frightens another as to destroy that person’s health be held liable in civil damages for his great wrong? For instance, what is the difference, in point of liability, on the part of a railroad company, between a case where a passenger is killed by a car running over him and the case where a passenger suffers a broken heart valve *365as a result of the fear he experienced in expecting death as a car passed over him, but which did not touch him? Is the negligence and responsibility of the tortfeasor any less marked toward the living man than to the dead man’s family when, after the throb of the overturned locomotive has ceased and the hissing of the punctured air brakes has faded away, there lie on the ground next to one another, the body of the dead passenger and the body of the living passenger, the latter unconscious, his outer body unblemished by a single scratch but his heart within him in ruins, so that when he awakens he will never again know a day of sound and joyous health?
I trust that the day will come when this Court will change its views on the responsibility of a tortfeasor in a noncontact injury as it has changed its views in the second matter discussed in the opinion of the Court here. This Court has ordered a new trial because the trial judge told the jury: “My comment, members of the jury, and I have a good reason for making it, is that I think the defendant is guilty, and that it would he a miscarriage of justice to find him not guilty ” (Emphasis supplied)
This is a wise and judicious decision although this Court did not hold that view in the case of Commonwealth v. Cisneros, 381 Pa. 447. The trial judge there also told the jury that “a verdict of not guilty would be a miscarriage of justice.” I said in my dissenting opinion there: “This kind of language placed before the jury a dead end in their path of deliberation, it erected a barrier with which conscience, logic, and intelligence could not cope. This language almost suggested to the jury that they themselves might have to answer for some species of misconduct if they acquitted the defendant.”
It is indeed gratifying to see that the law is progressing, even if not on all fronts simultaneously.