Court Opinion

ID: 9687506
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 16:33:16.568079+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:28.349579
License: Public Domain

MERRILL, Justice
(dissenting) :
The majority opinion sets, for the first time in Alabama, different standards in our wrongful death and homicide statutes. The opinion states that “due to the pervading public purpose of our wrongful death statute, which is to prevent homicide through punishment of the culpable party and the determination of damages by reference to the quality of the tortious act, we are again extending our judicial prerogative as was done in Huskey and Wolfe to hold that the parents of an eight and one-half month old stillborn fetus are entitled to maintain an action for the wrongful death of the child.”
I do not see this holding as an “extension” of Huskey v. State, 289 Ala. 52, 265 So.2d 596, and Wolfe v. Isbell, 291 Ala. 327, 280 So.2d 758, but a tremendous jump and a pronounced reversal of the previous holdings of our appellate courts.
I concurred in Huskey and although I did not participate in Wolfe, I agree with its holding. But the important fact present in those two cases is absent here. In Huskey, the child “was born alive.” In Wolfe, decided on the pleadings, the complaint showed that “the child was born alive and shortly thereafter died because of the prenatal injury.”
Here, the fetal child was stillborn. Our wrongful death statute, Tit. 7, § 119, begins “When the death of a minor child is caused by the wrongful act, * * The stillborn fetus was not a minor, had not lived after birth and no cause of action *101accrued to it. The same law is quoted in Wolfe from restatement (Second) of Torts, § 869, pp. 174-182, as follows:
“ ‘(1) One who tortiously causes harm to an unborn child is subject to liability to the child for such harm if it is born alive.
“‘(2) If the child is not born alive, there is no liability unless the applicable wrongful death statute so provides.’ Tent.Draft, supra, at 174. See 47 ALI Proceedings, 371-377 (1970).”
Our homicide statutes have been so construed in two decisions. In Singleton v. State, 33 Ala.App. 536, 35 So.2d 375, the Court of Appeals, per Harwood, J., said:
“In infanticide cases an.element additional to the required elements of the usual homicide case must be established by the State beyond a reasonable doubt, namely that the deceased babe was born alive, it being axiomatic that one cannot kill something already dead. Rough and rule of thumb tests were applied by the earlier cases, and the question of the viability of the child seems to have revolved around whether the child breathed and had a circulation independent of its mother. (Citations omitted.)”
On this phase of the case, the court said “it is our conclusion that the State met the burden of proof cast upon it to establish that the infant in the present case was born alive.” See also, Weaver v. State, 24 Ala.App. 208, 132 So. 706.
To convict a person for murder or manslaughter of a newly born baby, the evidence must show that it was born alive. Yet, the majority opinion holds that a suit can be brought where the child was not born alive under the wrongful death statute, which has as one of its purposes the prevention of homicide.
I respectfully dissent.
COLEMAN, HARWOOD and McCALL, JJ., concur.