Court Opinion

ID: 9550086
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:29:08.868285+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:09:52.517276
License: Public Domain

Hale, J.
(concurring in part; dissenting in part)—I concur except in that part of the majority opinion which grants damages to the deceased child’s estate in addition to those awarded the parents.
Now that the legislature has expressly allowed recovery for the death of a child to include “medical, hospital, medication expenses, and loss of services and support” and the “loss of love and companionship of the child and for injury *341to or destruction of the parent-child relationship” (RCW 4.24.010; Laws of 1967, Ex. Sess., ch. 81, § 1, p. 1734), and by decision this court has augmented the statute to include parental grief, anxiety and mental suffering (Wilson v. Lund, 80 Wn.2d 91, 491 P.2d 1287 (1971)), it is time to drop the long-persisting legal fiction that, even though there has been no proof of financial loss whatever, the death of a young child or infant operates to produce a pecuniary loss to the parents.
The law rests on truth, not fiction, and a legal fiction should be employed only where there are no available alternatives to the attainment of a sensible result. While for a long time the courts countenanced a legal fiction that minor children were a financial asset rather than a liability to parents, the courts can and should now substitute truth for fiction and let go of the idea that, in losing a young child, where no proof of pecuniary loss can be shown, the grief-stricken parents, in addition to other damages, have suffered a money loss, too. The courts should abandon the questionable presumption that this loss amounts to the difference between the cost of raising the child and the amount of family income the child would produce for the family before attaining majority. That fiction, acknowledged to be such by the courts, has never been anything but a creature of the judicial imagination, one rarely supported by any evidence and indulged in by the courts only from the necessity of providing some compensation to bereaved parents for a very real injury. With the enactment of RCW 4.24.010, the need for that fiction ceased to exist; to employ it, I think, is not in furtherance of but rather a denial of justice, for it not only allows the parents to recover but it assesses the defendants duplicative damages.
The fictional rule of damages in the death of a child awarding the parents the child’s net worth to them during his minority is the same kind of fiction indulged in now by the court to sustain the wholly unsupported $8,400 verdict returned for the estate here. That verdict was based on the idea that the child’s estate suffered a pecuniary loss not *342encompassed in the award to the parents. Thus, the former fiction of pecuniary loss to the parents has now been transmuted to the estate of the child and with no better reason in law and fact, for there was not and in the very nature of things could not be any rational proof submitted that the 7-year-old child’s estate suffered any financial loss whatever. Thus, to extend that rule, as I think the court now does, so as to project a 7-year-old girl’s earnings on into her life expectancy, deducting income taxes, maintenance, living expenses and encompassing all of the imponderables of life so as to reach some kind of a specific figure in dollars, amounted not only to an exercise in speculation and fantasy but to an excursion into the completely unknown. The question of reasonable certainty of proof versus exact proof as postulated now by the court does not, as I see it, enter this picture; there was no proof whatever, and indeed there could be none, that the child’s estate suffered a net pecuniary loss.
Bizarre as it was, the courts applied the formerly tolerated fiction in the interest of doing right; they formulated a rule which, in the absence of any proof, allowed the jury to return a verdict founded upon the fiction that a small child, if living to a majority, would, during that interval of its minority, bring into the family more money than the costs of maintaining and educating the child. That obvious and acknowledged fiction was engendered by the statute that gave survival to an action without any apparent genuine remedy for the parents. But now the remedy available to the parents is complete—except possibly for funeral expenses—to the exclusion of the child’s estate. The record here is devoid of proof that the child’s estate had suffered any pecuniary loss whatever, much less one of $8,400. Thus, the widely held rule that damages need not be proved with exactitude but only with reasonable certainty, has no application whatever here and does not obviate the rule that damages must be proved with reasonable certainty, and this requires some evidence. There is nothing to support the verdict for the estate here except pure fantasy.
*343Cogent reasons for dropping the fiction of pecuniary damages where there is no proof of them are graphically highlighted by our opinion in Wilson v. Lund, supra. That decision,, holding in effect that loss of companionship and destruction of the parent-child relationship (RCW 4.24.010) included parental grief, mental anguish and suffering, provided a rational and recognizable basis for a rule of damages and obviated the need for a fiction to give effect to the survival of actions statute.
Warner v. McCaughan, 77 Wn.2d 178, 460 P.2d 272 (1969), cited by the majority, does no more than restate a long-held principle which I think has little application here. I would read it to say that the old fiction of lost income against projected costs of maintenance is not available to the child’s estate but only to the parents. There, in discussing the remedy to the parents for the death of a child who was a college senior at the time of her death and who “was financially dependent upon her parents” and who “did not contribute financially to the support of anyone,” this court held that financial dependency was the basic element requisite to recovery by the parents for loss of the child’s prospective earnings and, where there was no dependency, that element of damages would not be allowed. Thus, in striking the claim for damages in that case because the record showed the parents were in no way dependent upon the earnings of their adult child, the court said, at page 185:
The statutes create the right of action and define those entitled to their benefits. The requirement of beneficiary status is express; the condition precedent to status is dependency. Plaintiffs do not meet this test.
In Warner v. McCaughan, supra, the court cites a valid principle from Hudson v. Lazarus, 217 F.2d 344, 348 (D.C. Cir. 1954). Now, in this case, I think the court misapplies the Hudson and Warner rationale. Hudson simply held that damages recoverable by the dependent wife for the death of a disabled man, who died as a result of the disabling injury, should include loss of earnings during his normal *344life expectancy had he lived, discounted to present worth. That the deceased husband’s administrator in Hudson could recover for all such damages, excluding pain and suffering, on behalf of the surviving wife as though the deceased had lived, does, I think, state the general rule. This, however, has little relevance to the award of damages to the estate of a 7-year-old child for loss of net pecuniary increment to her estate during her projected actuarial lifetime.
The rationale of both Hudson and Warner rests upon the idea of economic dependency. These two cases do state the general rule that the surviving dependent wife and children may recover for the wrongful death of the husband and father because they are financially dependent upon him or, as in Pancratz v. Turon, 3 Wn. App. 182, 473 P.2d 409 (1970), the parents may recover if they have suffered a pecuniary loss. But to extend this right of recovery to the deceased child’s estate per se with no proof that the deceased child’s heirs are or were in any wise dependent upon the child leads to the most absurd consequences.
If the parents survive and maintain an action for all elements of damages including grief, loss of companionship and destruction of the parent-child relationship, and medical, hospital and funeral expenses, then there are, I believe, in the absence of a proven economic dependency, no elements of damage which should be recovered by the child’s estate, and an award to the estate in such cases is duplicative, giving the parents, as beneficiaries of the deceased child’s estate, double damages. To allow recovery by the estate of a 7-year-old child, without a showing of economic dependency or actual pecuniary loss for diminution during the projected actuarial life of the child, gives the surviving brothers, sisters, cousins—and creditors, if any—a pecuniary stake in the child not contemplated, I think, by the survival of actions statutes. Heirs generally may not sue for such a loss. RCW 4.20.046, relating to the survival of actions by personal representatives against the tort-feasor, and RCW 4.24.010, specifically preserving the action for the death of a minor child to the surviving father and mother, *345do not, in the absence of dependency or provable loss, contemplate justifying an allowance of damages to a child’s collateral heirs, nor do they authorize recovery by creditors for debts not incurred. In the absence of a preexisting dependency, proved by a preponderance of the evidence, it seems to me to be both punitive and absurd to assess the defendants whatever damages the jury might say the child would, had she lived, accumulate in property and money during a normal life expectancy.
I would, therefore, affirm in all respects except the award to the estate, which I would reverse.