Court Opinion

ID: 9522800
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:32:26.589644+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:03:56.710737
License: Public Domain

Burgess, J.,
¶ 32. concurring in part and dissenting in part. With a footnote, the majority overturns what was fairly clear since enactment of workers’ compensation almost a century ago, and what Kittell v. Vermont Weatherboard, Inc., 138 Vt. 439, 441, 417 A.2d 926, 927 (1980) (per curiam), made explicitly clear: “[n]othing short of a specific intent to injure falls outside of the scope of the *384Act.” Instead, the majority now holds that prima facie intent to injure is made out, not by evidence of specific intent to injure, but by evidence that an employer knows that a machine is inevitably dangerous. Ante, ¶ 31 n.5 (“We cannot say that a reasonable fact-finder could not infer intent to injure based on these circumstances [where the employer appreciated the dangerousness of the press, but nevertheless rendered the light guards ineffective by removing the hard guard].”). Thus, the majority adopts a liberal version of a “substantial certainty of injury” exception to the exclusive remedy of workers’ compensation, but fails to explain how this employer’s injurious maintenance practices differ from “wanton, wilful, deliberate, intentional, reckless ... or malicious negligence” not exempted from the Act’s coverage. Kittell, 138 Vt. at 441, 417 A.2d at 927. This is a major amendment to a statute that is not ours to rewrite.
¶ 33. Moreover, the majority’s characterization of defendant’s “appreciation” of the danger is wrong. Although plaintiffs experts opined that they understood the danger, they did not state that defendant shared the same knowledge. Clearly defendant did not actually intend an injury, or it would have either removed all the guards, or not bothered to install the additional guards. Certainly, injurious machinery is to be discouraged, but the catalog of arguably avoidable workplace injuries is virtually limitless. Yet, by substituting evidence of apparent inevitability of dangerousness in place of the specific intent to injure required under Kittell, the majority’s analysis renders many, if not most or all, machine-induced workplace injuries subject to tort action, rather than workers’ compensation.
¶ 34. While I agree with the majority opinion in all other aspects of this decision, it is incorrect to hold that plaintiff is not barred by the Workers’ Compensation Act from suing defendant in tort. Plaintiff carried the burden of proof on this issue, but failed to proffer any evidence to show that defendant specifically intended to injure him — the only exception to the Act’s exclusive remedy provision — as was required to survive defendant’s motion for summary judgment.6 Moreover, the majority’s holding that employer liability beyond its obligations under the Workers’ *385Compensation Act can be premised on a claimed “substantial certainty” of workplace injury is a significant departure from established law. Because this injects a potentially vast uncertainty into what was a settled legislative scheme of employer strict liability to pay defined, but guaranteed, benefits to injured employees, and effectively changes the Act, I respectfully dissent.
¶ 35. Since enactment of the workers’ compensation system in 1917, employer liability for workplace injury is not supposed to be a moving target. As noted above, it has been long settled that “[njothing short of a specific intent to injure falls outside of the scope of the Act.” Kittell, 138 Vt. at 441, 417 A.2d at 927. That the Legislature intended to strictly curtail tort liability in favor of a starkly exclusive remedy of a statutory schedule of compensation was emphatically confirmed in Kittell, where we summarized that “[t]he overwhelming weight of authority in other jurisdictions is that the common-law liability of the employer cannot be stretched to include accidental injuries caused by the gross, wanton, wilful, deliberate, intentional, reckless, culpable, or malicious negligence, breach of statute, or other misconduct of the employer short of genuine intentional injury.” Id. (quotation omitted).
¶ 36. Here, defendant moved for summary judgment on the issue of whether it was immune from a tort suit by plaintiff under the exclusivity provision of the Workers’ Compensation Act. Defendant argued in its motion that plaintiff failed to put forth any evidence of injurious intent. In response, plaintiff submitted affidavits of safety experts who testified that defendant’s actions made an accident unavoidable, but produced no additional evidence to prove defendant acted with any specific intent to cause injury. Viewed in the light most favorable to plaintiff, his evidence showed: defendant’s safety officer was not involved in every equipment safety decision and never checked the Komatsu Press prior to plaintiffs injury; Stamp Tech arranged the light curtains *386for a single operator, but defendant used multiple operators on the press; defendant knew the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration required a new safety check when operation of the press changed from a single operator to multiple operators, but it did not conduct a new safety check; OSHA requires a set of palm controls for every press operator while this press had but a single set of palm controls and was operated with multiple employees; Stamp Tech’s installation of the light curtains, with the hard guard in place, made the press safe for all operators, but defendant removed the hard guard. Finally, plaintiff’s experts opined that the use and set-up of the machine made serious injury “substantially certain” or “inevitable.”
¶ 37. While removal of the hard guard may have been inherently dangerous, none of this evidence suggests that defendant actually intended to injure plaintiff or knew that such injury was inevitable. In fact, plaintiff appeared to concede there was no proof of any specific intent to injure, claiming instead that the injury was “inevitable,” or was a “substantial certainty.” Whether “somewhat imprecise,” as characterized by the majority, ante, ¶ 26 n.4, or not, plaintiff never asserted that defendant intended to injure him. The complaint did not allege injurious intent and, responding to defendant’s motion for summary judgment in the absence of proof of intent, plaintiff argued that this Court no longer adhered to the specific-intent standard. Plaintiff did allege that defendant’s actions in removing the hard guard and ordering multiple employees to operate the machine were intentional actions, but intentional actions resulting in injury are not synonymous with a specific intent to injure. Cf. Mead v. Western Slate, Inc., 2004 VT 11, ¶ 17, 176 Vt. 274, 848 A.2d 257 (the intentional action of ordering an employee to work in a known dangerous area where a rock slide recently occurred could not support a reasonable inference that the employer knew to a substantial certainty that an accident would occur, let alone that the employer specifically intended to injure the employee). Indeed, the undisputed fact that defendant installed light guards on the machine, the only apparent purpose of which was to prevent employee injury, belies any claim that defendant intended to injure its employees with this particular machine, especially absent any evidence to the contrary.
¶ 38. Ruling on the motion for summary judgment according to the law in effect at the time under Kittell, the superior court accurately summarized that the “most that can be adduced from *387the undisputed facts, and the evidence in the record, is that [defendant] knowingly permitted] a hazardous work condition to exist, which conclusion still falls short of the kind of actual intent to injure necessary to support [plaintifffs claim against [defendant].” The majority’s observation that intent is often inferred from actions and circumstances, rather than from direct evidence of the actor’s state of mind, is no substitute for the lack of any action or circumstance in this case to support the notion that defendant intended injury.
¶ 39. Injury from an improperly shielded machine is always, in some sense, inevitably certain at some point in time. Hence the need for guards. Maintaining a machine in such condition as to make an injury “inevitable,” as plaintiffs witnesses testified, at some undetermined time in the future and absent any particularized knowledge of the danger on the part of the employer, cannot equate to a specific intent to injure. Absent such intent by the defendant, plaintiffs “sudden but foreseeable injury constitutes ‘personal injury by accident’ within section 618” and is covered by the Act. Kittell, 138 Vt. at 440, 417 A.2d at 926. Plaintiff failed in both his initial proffer and in his response to defendant’s motion to present evidence that could carry his burden on this claim, and summary judgment for defendant was properly entered.
¶ 40. Recognizing his lack of evidence of specific intent, plaintiff alternatively posits the “substantial certainty” of injury as another avenue by which to overcome the statutory exclusivity of workers’ compensation as a remedy. This exception — recognized by some states — had not before been adopted in Vermont. We entertained the theory in Mead, but only in the context of holding that if “substantial certainty” was the legal standard — as urged by that plaintiff — his evidence was still insufficient to support the claim. Mead, 2004 VT 11, ¶ 20. Mead reviewed the various departures from specific intent in other jurisdictions, noting that “[t]he standard is not uniform,” and described different tests ranging from “a substitute for a subjective desire to injure” to “virtual certainty” to a willful disregard of “actual knowledge” of certain injury. Id. ¶¶ 13-14. However this lesser standard is defined, “substantial certainty” remains less than the specific intent to injure necessary to fall outside of workers’ compensation for accidental injury, and so was expressly precluded by Kittell as a matter of law. The variety of standards and competing public policy choices behind the new “substantial certainty” exemption, as *388outlined in Mead, only underscore that amending the Workers’ Compensation Act as promoted by plaintiff is clearly not an interpretive exercise for this Court, but a legislative decision for the General Assembly.
¶ 41. Finally, even under the Mead analysis, the superior court was correct that plaintiff proffered no facts to show that defendant knew an injury was substantially certain to result from modification to the machine. The Mead Court declined to consider departing from the rule of Kittell absent evidence “ ‘fairly and reasonably’ supporting] a rational inference that defendants knew to a substantial certainty their actions would result in injury to plaintiff.” Id. ¶ 17 (citing Gero v. J.W.J Realty, 171 Vt. 57, 59, 757 A.2d 475, 476 (2000)). That plaintiffs experts perceived the injury to be substantially certain or inevitable is not evidence that his employer shared the same perception or knowledge. Assuming, as in Mead, that “there is little doubt that defendant] [was] negligent in exposing plaintiff to the known risk[,] . . . there is no evidence from which a jury could reasonably infer that defendant[] knew the injury to plaintiff was substantially certain to occur.” Id. ¶ 19. Having departed from the rule of Kittell, the majority can cite no evidence to support its conclusion to the contrary.
¶ 42. The superior court was doubly right. Until today, there was no “substantial certainty of injury” exception to the exclusivity of workers’ compensation, and plaintiffs evidence could not support such a claim even when allowed now. See Mead, 2004 VT 11, ¶ 19, ante, ¶ 27. The superior court’s summary judgment on both points should be affirmed, and changes to the legislation should be left to the Legislature.
¶ 43. I am authorized to state that Justice Skoglund joins in this dissent.

 The majority states that summary judgment was premature in this case because there were material facts in dispute regarding the issue of intent, but defendant was not required to show an absence of factual dispute to succeed on his motion for judgment. Instead, as the party not bearing the burden of proof at trial, *385defendant may obtain summary judgment where plaintiff cannot “make a showing sufficient to establish the existence of an element essential to his case.” Poplaski v. Lamphere, 152 Vt. 251, 254, 565 A.2d 1326, 1329 (1989) (internal quotation omitted). Here, defendant showed that, under then existing law and accepting all of plaintiff’s allegations as true, plaintiff had not and could not establish facts to prove a specific intent to injure. See Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 322 (1986). In such a situation, the moving party need not establish that there are any undisputed material facts because “a complete failure of proof concerning an essential element of the nonmoving party’s case necessarily renders all other facts immaterial.” Id. at 323.