Court Opinion

ID: 9648392
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:18:53.565795+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:00.158002
License: Public Domain

DIES, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. The majority opinion — following the trial court — holds that the 1933 decision of United Fidelity Life Ins. Co. v. Roach, 63 S.W.2d 723 (Tex.Civ.App., Amarillo, 1933, error ref.), is dispositive of the case we review. However, in my view, there is enough distinction between that case and ours to permit us to adopt a more enlightened and common sense attitude to this dispute.
In Roach, the policy excluded coverage for accidental death resulting “ ‘from suicide whether sane or insane, from murder, poisoning, bacterial infection, illness or disease of any kind.’ ” (63 S.W.2d at 724) Here the exclusion reads, “poisoning or infection (other than that occurring simultaneously with and in consequence of accidental death . . . .”
The parties stipulated that “[tjhe autopsy stated that the cause of death of Jack Lee Pickering was carbon monoxide poisoning acute with suffocation resulting from the lack of oxygen . . . .” Therefore, examining the exclusion literally and assuming the Roach holding that a carbon monoxide induced death is exclusionary “poison” still to be the law, nevertheless, the lack of oxygen was a non-exclusionary, accidental and simultaneous cause of death.
There is no contention that Officer Pickering’s death was not accidental. In interpreting the language and meaning of this insurance policy, we should be governed by the understanding of the average man. In Kingsley v. American Central Life Ins. Co., 259 Mich. 53, 242 N.W. 836 (1932), the policy excluded accidental death benefits “resulting directly or indirectly from * * * poisons.” That case quotes Justice Cardozo in Lewis v. Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corp., 224 N.Y. 18, 120 N.E. 56, 7 A.L.R. 1129 (1918) using this unanswerable language:
“ ‘To the scientist who traces the origin of disease there may seem to be no accident in all this. * * * But our point of view in fixing the meaning of this contract must not be that of the scientist. It must be that of the average man. * * * This test — the one that is ap*187plied in the common speech of men — is also the test to be applied by courts.’ ”
44 Am.Jur.2d, Insurance, § 1340 (1969) states:
“[I]t has been held, despite some contrary authority, that death caused by the inhalation of carbon monoxide gas did not result directly or indirectly from ‘poison’ within the meaning of an exception of death from poison in a double indemnity clause in a life policy, even though such gas technically is a poison.”
This policy was written by appellee. If this type of accidental death was to be excluded from the policy, there is no good reason not to require it to be spelled out understandably in the policy rather than relying on an exclusion for “poison” which, to an average man, would not include this cause of death.