Court Opinion

ID: 9545061
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:05:21.482113+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:14:00.483568
License: Public Domain

HARNSBERGER, Justice
(dissenting).
The essence of the majority opinion is that an insured must at the time of an accident be in a state of perfect health and physical condition, entirely free from all terminal affliction which might eventually result in death, in order to receive any benefit under the type of accident policy involved in this litigation. Even though the insured would have lived for half a century, except for the accident, recovery must be denied because the accident only accelerated death.
With this I cannot agree.
The far-reaching effect of the majority holding is to render almost entirely valueless the type of insurance which deceased had. Unhappily, many who have this same kind of insurance are misled into believing they have provided insurance compensation only to find when they have suffered accidental misfortune that the presence of some ailment defeats their insurance coverage, notwithstanding it was the accident which shortened their lives.
In giving his reasons for vacating and setting aside the jury’s verdict and judgment thereon, the trial judge said, “The jury would be justified in determining that he died when he died sooner than he would have but for the fracture, as a direct and proximate result of the accidental fracture and amputation. This seems indisputable.” Thus, that death was accelerated by the accidental injury was conceded. Now this court holds, as a matter of law, that an accident which hastens death by inciting to an acute stage an existing terminal affliction is not covered by the insurance because the accident did not cause immediate death, although it aggravated and set in motion an existing physical condition from which death resulted. The trial court itself manifested doubt as to the correctness of its reversal saying, “What the Wyoming rule will finally be is for the appellate court.” The effect of what this court now says is that a person suffering, for instance, from such a not unusual chronic affliction as heart trouble, whose expectancy may nonetheless be reasonably prolonged indefinitely by careful living but who is brought to death by heart failure due to shock from serious accident, will now be considered as not having died by reason of the accident as an independent cause but to have died only from heart disease.
We are only concerned with the death that actually occurred. We are not speculating about a death which might later *725have occurred. The actual death would not have occurred had there been no accident. It occurred solely and independently from the accident itself, not from any intervening cause. An intervening cause is not a pre-existing condition rendered acutely terminal by accident. Intervening ■cause is something extraneous to and unconnected with the accident. Intervening cause is one which occurs from unrelated occurrences, such as being shot or stabbed ■or poisoned or suffering any number of additional or further misfortunes entirely unconnected with the original accidental injury. Under the evidence and by the trial court’s own statement, deceased’s cancerous death was the direct result of the accident which broke his leg.
The undisputed and conceded facts sum up to mean death would not have occurred when it did except for the accidental injury to deceased, yet the court now says it is to be the law in Wyoming that a person, although ostensibly insured against accidental death, must be denied accident insurance recovery even though life is in fact shortened by accident. This is tantamount to saying there is no insurable value in the continuation of life. No matter if the insured, though afflicted with cancer, heart ailment, tuberculosis — with any one of a myriad of eventually terminal troubles —would live additional days, months, or years on end had there been no accident, a recovery cannot be had under such accident insurance even though an accident activates a condition which causes death.
As the district court said, it was the jury’s right to find the accidental injury brought about the earlier death of the insured. While it is the right of this court to announce the law applicable under the facts thus ascertained, the holding now made should at least serve as warning to the public that in the purchase of the type of accident insurance held by deceased they are buying and paying for an insurance coverage they will never get unless they are perfect physical and health specimens at the time they suffer accident.