Court Opinion

ID: 9670068
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:13:53.367016+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:02.103763
License: Public Domain

LEEDOM, J.
(dissenting). I think the award made by the Industrial Commissioner and affirmed by the circuit court should be sustained. In my opinion the circumstances of the fall and the medical testimony support the award under the valid and prevailing rule in compensation cases. Compare Maher v. Duluth Yellow Cab Co., 172 Minn. 439, 215 N.W. 678; Hiber v. City of St. Paul, 219 Minn. 87, 16 N.W.2d 878; Dean v. Benton Harbor-St. Joe Ry. & Light Co., 231 Mich. 23, 203 N.W. 952; McVicar v. Harper Hospital, 313 Mich. 48, 20 N.W.2d 806; Peter Kiewit Sons’ Co. v. Industrial Commission of Colorado, 124 Col. 217, 236 P.2d 296; Blackfoot Coal & Land Corporation v. Cooper, 121 Ind.App. 313, 95 N.E.2d 639; Carpenter v. Sibley, Lindsay & Curr Co., 302 N.Y. 304, 97 N.E.2d 915; Walter v. Hagianis, 97 N.H. 314, 87 A.2d 154; Hampton Roads Stevedoring Corporation v. O’Hearne, 4 Cir., 184 F.2d 76; and the cases therein cited.
The lack of certainty in the doctor’s testimony, as appears from these cases, should not spoil the whole effect of his testimony nor nullify his expressed view that death from hemorrhage due to the fall was more likely than death from a stroke inasmuch as the deceased was able to sit up soon after the accident and that ability to thus sit up and talk is not the usual history of a stroke in a man of decedent’s age group. As I see it this statement is not mere conjecture but rather a substantial medical opinion, necessarily equivocal to a degree because of the inexactness of medical science, but grounded on the factual basis of the fall; and the commissioner’s inference based thereon that death resulted from the fall seems entirely rational.
It is quite clear to me that the evidence rule on which the majority opinion rests, announced in Erickson v. Todd, 62 S. D. 280, 284, 252 N.W. 879, 881, should not be extended to compensation cases. The true rule I am satisfied, and I *554believe the cases above cited so indicate, is that the commissioner is entitled to draw any reasonable inference from evidence such as we have in this case, is not only entitled but duty bound to weigh probabilities, and then to decide the fact issue accordingly; and that it is outside the function of a reviewing court to disturb such finding of fact even though in its own view another or different inference seems equally or even more logical. As early as 1925 the Supreme Court of Michigan in Dean v. Benton Harbor-St. Joe Ry. & Light Co. above, declined to apply to a fact situation somewhat analogous to ours the rule of Sanderson’s Case, 224 Mass. 558, 113 N.E. 355, 1916 on which the majority opinion of this court relies and which formed the basis of a dissent in the Michigan case.