Court Opinion

ID: 9776239
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 19:28:19.361621+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:36.176647
License: Public Domain

POPE, Chief Justice,
dissenting on motion for rehearing.
I respectfully dissent. I would not visit punishment upon the children and family of the deceased wrongdoer in either a criminal action or a civil action. Plaintiffs, in pressing the right to recover punitive damages from a dead person, accelerate the need for a reexamination of the whole subject of punitive damages. The court holds that the purpose of punitive damages is to punish, to deter others by example, and also to compensate for remote and uncompensated actual damages. If those are the varied purposes, then awards for punitive damages are not anchored to sound doctrinal underpinnings. The whole subject of punitive damages needs study.
Professor Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr. in his article, Fairness and Efficiency in the Law of Punitive Damages, 56 S.CAL.L.REV. 1 (1982), explains that the concept of punitive damages exists somewhere in the borderland between criminal law and torts, and yet it has received only scant attention and is usually relegated to discussion in a footnote. Whether the remedy is civil or criminal in nature, punitive damages are awarded upon vague standards not found in the criminal law and not permitted in the civil law in assessing all other kinds of damages.
I agree with Justice Spears’ dissent that the only sound basis for continuing to award punitive damages is that they punish wrongdoers. To say that punitive damages serve as an example and deter egregious conduct is merely to state the purpose of punishment.
The court finds that one reason for awarding punitive damages is to compensate for those elements of injury not covered by an award of actual damages. The court cites Mayer v. Duke, 72 Tex. 445, 10 S.W. 565, 569 (1889) for its statement that punitive damages compensate a claimant for losses too remote to be considered as elements of compensation. It cites Allison v. Simmons, 306 S.W.2d 206 (Tex.Civ.App. —Waco 1957, writ ref’d n.r.e.), for the proposition that punitive damages compensate for inconvenience and attorney fees. Early decisions by this court permitted punitive damages because the law failed to recognize all of the damages' required to fully compensate a plaintiff. Stuart v. Western Union Tel. Co., 66 Tex. 580, 18 S.W. 351 (1885); Flanagan v. Womack & Perry, 54 Tex. 45 (1880).
If punitive damages are presently used only to cloak additional elements of actual damages, they should not be allowed at all. We are careful to require a measure of certainty in all other forms of compensatory damages; why should we allow punitive damages to stand alone without any standards or instructions necessary for recovery. If punitive damages serve to permit recovery for some kind of unmentioned compensation, how can we know that there is not a double recovery? If punitive damages mask phantom elements of actual damages, why is it that a plaintiff in an ordinary negligence case is denied those illusive forms of compensatory damages, but a plaintiff can recover them when he proves gross negligence? For example, attorney fees are not recoverable in a negligence case, and they should not be recovered under the guise of punitive damages. We should no longer countenance this legerdemain. We should address the matter of any uncompensated actual damages forthrightly. Certainly we should not permit punitive damages to be an indirect method of collecting attorney fees.
Tangential forms of compensatory damages, if ever justifiably recovered as punitive damages, are now items added to the catalogue of elements that have been carefully isolated, articulated, and explained to *480juries. Past and future earnings, past and future pain and suffering, past and future medical expenses, funeral costs, loss of society, disfigurement, loss of consortium, emotional trauma, past and future mental anguish constitute recoverable items that make the victim whole. Any additional actual damages should be added to the list; they should not be allowed to masquerade as punitive damages.
Since punishment and deterrence are the true reasons for punitive damages, and since compensation to victims is not a sound basis for punitive damages, we need to examine the relationship between criminal and civil fines. Punishment is the common thread that has always run through the Texas cases allowing punitive damages. Smith v. Sherwood, 2 Tex. 460, 463 (1847). The damages are not only awarded for the benefit of the aggrieved party, but they are granted to further the public good. Cole v. Tucker, 6 Tex. 266 (1851); Graham v. Roder, 5 Tex. 141, 149 (1849). They are permitted as a “private remedy to become an instrument of public correction.” Graham v. Roder, at 150. Punitive damages, says Cotton v. Cooper, 209 S.W. 135, 138 (Tex. Comm’n App.1919, opinion adopted), “are not awarded to enrich the injured party, but are intended rather for the public good _” They are compensation for a “quasi-criminal act of commission or malfeasance.” Southern Cotton Press Co. v. Bradley, 52 Tex. 587, 601 (1880).
If we are to continue using punitive damages as a private system of law enforcement for conduct that offends public standards, we must consider innovative ways to improve that system. Who should receive the money derived from the trial that enforces the public good? Should fines imposed for civil wrongs that offend the public go to the state? The tort victim is entitled to be made whole; that should be accomplished by allowing him full compensation for every kind of damage suffered. Some scholars are asking why all of the punitive damages award should go to the victim, when it serves as a civil fine or penalty recovered to benefit the whole public. The victim, who affords the means and provides the attorney to suppress the antisocial conduct, needs some incentive to bring forward the extra proof required to punish the tortfeasor. See Cooter, Economic Analysis of Punitive Damages, 56 S.CAL.L.REV. 79, 90 n. 9 (1982). For his service the attorney should recover a fair fee, perhaps one-third of the punitive damages. If we permit recovery of punitive damages for the public good against a deceased person, I would divide that recovery, after attorney fees, equally between the plaintiffs and the State’s General Fund.
GONZALEZ, J., joins in this dissent.