Court Opinion

ID: 9451600
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 17:20:16.880711+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:48.671760
License: Public Domain

KALODNER, Chief Judge
(dissenting).
I disagree with the majority’s view that the wrongful shortening of one’s life expectancy is not a separate element of damages in a Jones Act1 case.
.1 am of the opinion that the láw accords a right to life and its enjoyment, and that the invasion of this right is properly compensable as a separate element of damages.
As one text writer has graphically epitomized it, “the shortening of life through injury involves an amputation of life substance and so an absolute and irremediable loss.”2
The English courts have long allowed recovery for shortening of life expectancy as a separate and distinct element of damages. Benham v. Gambling, A.C. 157, 166, 1 All.E.R. 7, 12 (1941); Rose v. Ford, A.C. 826, 3 All.E.R. 359 (1937); Flint v. Lovell, 1 K.B. 354, 97 A.L.R. 814 (1934); Phillips v. The London and South Western Railway Company, 5 Q.B. 78 (1879).
The English rule was succinctly stated by Lord Atkin, in Rose v. Ford, supra, as follows (p. 834):
“It does not seem to me necessary to say that a man has a personal right of the nature of property in his life, so that when it is diminished he loses something in the nature of valuable property. * * * I am satisfied that the injured person is damnified by having cut short the period during which he had a normal expectation of enjoying life: and that the loss, damnum, is capable of being estimated in terms of money: and that the calculation should be made. * ;* *
“I am of opinion therefore that a living person can claim damages for loss of expectation of life. * * * ” (emphasis supplied)
Lord Wright, in concurring, said (p. 848):
“A man has a legal right that his life should not be shortened by the tortious act of another. His normal expectancy of life is a thing of temporal value, so that its impairment is something for which damages should be given. * * *
*349“In one sense it is true that no money can be compensation for life or the enjoyment of life, and in that sense it is impossible to fix compensation for the shortening of life. But it is the best the law can do. It would be paradoxical if the law refused to give any compensation at all because none could be adequate.”
In refusing to subscribe to the English doctrine the majority has cited two federal and several state court cases in support.
With respect to the state cases it must immediately be said that they are without precedential value since this is a Jones Act case and federal law applies. The Jones Act is “remedial, for the benefit and protection of seamen who are peculiarly the wards of admiralty. Its purpose was to enlarge that protection, not to narrow it. * * * Its provisions, * * * are to be liberally construed to attain that end.” The Arizona v. Anelich, 298 U.S. 110, 123, 56 S.Ct. 707, 711, 80 L.Ed. 1075 (1936).
The federal cases, Farrington v. Stoddard, 115 F.2d 96, 131 A.L.R. 1344 (1 Cir. 1949) and O’Leary v. United States Lines Co., 111 F.Supp. 745 (D.Mass. 1953) are inapposite here for these reasons: (1) in neither case was the action instituted by the person whose life had been wrongfully shortened; (2) neither case was one under the Jones Act; (3) in both cases it was held that the local state survival and death statutes did not permit the estates to recover damages, per se, for a shortened life.
To what has been said earlier with respect to the inapplicability of the state court decisions cited by the majority this may be added:
In Ham v. Maine-New Hampshire Interstate Bridge Authority, 92 N.H. 268, 30 A.2d 1 (1943), and Ramsdell v. Grady, 97 Me. 319, 54 A. 763 (1903), the actions were not by one whose life had been shortened, but by his estate, and further, in neither was recovery sought for a shortened life as an independent element of damages.
In Richmond Gas Co. v. Baker, 146 Ind. 600, 45 N.E. 1049, 36 L.R.A. 683 (1897), the court’s holding that the plaintiff could not recover for the shortening of her life was premised on the specious assumption that since the death of a person could not be complained of as a legal wrong in a civil action at common law, curtailment of life is not an actionable injury. It is apparent that the court was persuaded to its view by precedents resting upon the authority of Baker v. Bolton, 1 Camp. 493 (1808) where it was said:
“In a civil court the death of a human being could not be complained of as an injury.”
It is equally apparent that the court (1) did not consider the fact that Lord Campbell’s Act of 1846, which permitted so-called survival actions, had made obsolete Baker v. Bolton’s holding, and (2) that it did not seem aware of the fact that an English court in 1879, in Phillips v. London and South Western Railway Company, supra, had allowed damages to a plaintiff for his shortened life.
In Lake Erie & W. R. Co. v. Johnson, 191 Ind. 479, 133 N.E. 732 (1922), where it was also held that damages are not recoverable for a shortened life, the court, without discussion, premised its holding on its earlier decision in Richmond Gas.
Rhone v. Fisher, 224 Md. 223, 167 A.2d 773 (1961), affords some measure of nourishment to the majority’s position. There, the court refused to subscribe to the English doctrine, and ruled that a living plaintiff cannot recover, as a separate item, damages for a shortened life. The ruling of the court, is, however, “watered down”, so to say, by its statement that the trial judge had properly charged the jury “that they might consider the evidence relating to the shortening of life ‘in considering the seriousness of the injury and the consequent pain and suffering and the mental anguish, if any, to which the plaintiff has been and will be subjected in the future.’ ”
*350In the instant case the trial judge properly charged the jury that it could compensate the plaintiff for the wrongful shortening of his life expectancy as a separate element of damages. He erred when he later struck from the jury’s verdict its allowance of $25,000 for the curtailment of the plaintiff’s life span. I would reverse with directions to reinstate the jury’s verdict as rendered by it.3
The majority’s ruling that the shortening of one’s life span is not “ver se a compensable element of damages * * * because of the incalculable variables which may enter into any attempt to place a value on life” is in irreconcilable conflict with its simultaneous declaration that “damages for the curtailment of one’s life' expectancy” may be awarded when “based on measurable components of injury” since such curtailment is a “permanent injury”, and “the denial of recovery for this curtailment benefits the tort feasor at the expense of his victim”.
The “measurable components of injury” which the majority lists as “provable elements”, in footnote 3 of its opinion, are “inability to dance, bowl, swim or engage in similar recreational activities; inability to perform customary household chores; and, inability to engage in the usual family activities.”
I cannot subscribe to a doctrine which sanctions compensation for “inability to dance, bowl, swim or engage in similar recreational activities” but denies compensation for the loss of the right to life itself; the right to enjoy the companionship of loved ones; the right to see the glorious dawn and sunset, to feel the caress of gentle breezes or the invigorating sting of winter winds, to hear the murmur of the idling brook and the music of warbling birds, to smell the sweet fragrance of nature’s flowers, and to taste the diet of life itself.
The distilled essence of the majority’s doctrine is that the part is greater than the whole; that the fragments of life which it specifies have ascertainable value, but that the total fabric and structure of life itself has no separate ascertainable value.
The courts of this land have time and again ruled that damages are recoverable for loss of enjoyment of life.
In Haynes v. Waterville & O. St. Ry., 101 Me. 335, 64 A. 614 (1906), where a young boy had his hand amputated, the court stated that the loss took a great deal of enjoyment out of the boy’s prospective life and that loss of earning power was by no means the extent of the injury.
In King’s Indiana Billiard Co. v. Winters, 123 Ind.App. 110, 106 N.E.2d 713 (1952), the jury in fixing damages for personal injuries was required to consider that the plaintiff was deprived of loss of privileges and enjoyment common to men of his class.
In Sox v. United States, 187 F.Supp. 465 (D.Del.1960), the court allowed recovery for “deprivation of normal life expectancy” (p. 469) to an infant plaintiff who was grievously maimed for life in the sixth month of her mother’s pregnancy.
As the Michigan Supreme Court has said:
“We are aware, of course, that there are those who say that the life of a human being is impossible to value, that although we will grapple mightily with the value of the life of a horse, of a team of mules, we will stand aloof where a human is concerned and assign it no value whatever. This kind of delicacy would prevent the distribution of food to the starving because the sight of hunger is so sickening. But we cannot shirk this difficult problem of valuation. In the cases coming to us a life has been taken and it is our duty, as best we can, to put a fair valuation on it.” Wycko v. Gnodtke, 361 Mich. 331, 105 N.W.2d 118, 122 (1960).
In rejecting the English doctrine that the shortening of life expectancy is a *351separate and distinct element of damages, the majority in its stead enunciates guidelines for instructions to a jury which will open a Pandora’s Box. One can readily envision resort to appellate review, when a trial judge in strict adherence to the majority’s guidelines, fails to include in his charge of “measurable components of injury”, a component such as, for example, the loss of the right of a parent whose life has been shortened to share in the upbringing of his child or children.
The only workable basis of consideration of the issue of value of a shortened life span is its submission to a jury of one’s peers as a separate element of damages. The jury can be counted on to bring to bear in its consideration of such an element the consensus of the common sense of its members, their collective experience and judgment, and their panoramic sweep of all aspects of the issue.
One need only point to the fact that in the instant case the jury’s award for the 8-year shortened span of the plaintiff’s life was in the amount of $25,000- — approximately $3,000 a year — a sum moderate in its proportions.
Judge STALEY joins in this dissent.

. 46 U.S.C.A. § 688.

. Hubert Winston Smith, Director of the Law-Science Institute, Tulane University; “Psychic Interest in Continuation of One’s Own Life; Legal Recognition and Protection”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Yol. 98, page 781, note 1 (1950).

. The opinion of the District Court is reported at 231 F.Supp. 192 (E.D.Pa.1964).