Court Opinion

ID: 9548838
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:09:26.970388+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:19:28.352213
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frantz
dissenting:
In a specially concurring opinion in Herbertson v. Russell, No. 19,691 (decided May 7, 1962), I expressed concepts concerning the wrongful death statute differing from those espoused by the majority in that case. Consistent with my previously stated concepts, entertaining them as I still do, I am opposed to the prevailing opinion in this case.
My arraignment of the net pecuniary loss dogma applied in the Herbertson case takes on a sharper delineation by reason of the majority opinion in the present case. The verdict awarding $700.00 (representing funeral expenses and less than $100.00 for other damage), upon which judgment was entered, is a paltry sum to equate for the life of a four-year-old healthy boy.
For us to sanction a judgment in this amount on the theory that only net pecuniary loss represents the measure of damages where the boy’s death resulted from fault is to defer to an essentially materialistic tenet dis*324cordant with the word and spirit of the Constitution of this state. Materialism and our Bill of Rights are intrinsically antagonistic.
I cannot believe that the “natural, essential and inalienable” right to enjoy life, given measured recognition in the Bill of Rights (Art. II, Sec. 3, Const. Colo.) is, in this case, just a beautiful aspiration and nothing more. Yet that is the effect of the majority opinion. For all that remains, at most, is the moral right to enjoy life; the right recognized by law — indeed, guaranteed by the Constitution — is little more than nothing in a juridical sense.
I would have this constitutional provision be more than “sonority without content,” more than “sounding brass,” more than the subject of patriotic orations. It is our solemn duty to give these words of the Bill of Rights their mandatory meaning and not reduce them to a hortatory significance.
The “right” to enjoy life envisages “duty” as its correlative. A right without a corresponding duty is semantic emasculation. A legal right with only a corresponding moral duty is jurisprudentially a solecism. A right in law loses its true traditional dimension when not complemented by a duty in law. Neither can stand alone and free of the other without rendering both meaningless.
An award of funeral expenses plus something less than $100.00 for the life of the Kogul child just about makes “duty” a moral compulsion only, if the majority opinion in a practical sense means anything. Such results from an adherence to stare decisis. When it is made to appear that stare decisis produces an unhappy application and also runs contra to a constitutional mandate, the time is auspicious for a change in concepts.
Other courts in recent times have been vexed with the same problem. Some have refused to kowtow to stare decisis on less tenable grounds than I propose. Indeed, these courts have re-interpreted their wrongful death *325statutes, and in so doing have expanded the measure of damages beyond net pecuniary loss, to permit recovery for loss of the comfort, society, assistance and protection of the deceased. Wycko v. Gnodtke, 361 Mich. 331, 105 N.W. (2d) 118 (1960); Fussner v. Ardert, 261 Minn. 347, 113 N.W. (2d) 355 (1961). See Holder v. Key System, 88 Cal. App. (2d) 925, 200 P. (2d) 98.
It will be the rare exception when net pecuniary loss as a measure of damages does not imply wage-earning. Related to a baby or a child of tender years, who has lost his life through the intentional or negligent act of another, net pecuniary loss has little or no relevance except the courts winl^. at the fiction that juries through some occult power are able to project their minds into the future and say that this child will and that child will not be a wage earner. In other circumstances we would unhestitatingly label such damages, founded upon such assumed prophetic powers, imaginary and speculative. It is urged that we abandon the fiction and adopt a realistic standard.
This case affords a felicitous cccasion for discarding a harsh rule and giving, at the same time, due recognition to one of the most sacred and precious of all admitted natural rights: the right to life. A right to life, a duty to respect and honor that right: this is the ultimate, fundamental principle of a republican form of government in which the dignity of man is acknowledged and protected.
Whatever else I would say would be only a restatement of views presented in my concurring opinion in the Herbertson case. Those views, I submit, have equal validity to this case, and I would have them apply here.