Court Opinion

ID: 9551682
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:57:20.853834+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:24:23.433394
License: Public Domain

HERD, J.,
concurring and dissenting: I concur with the majority that the trial court erred in its ruling on the burden of proof.
However, I dissent from the majority holding that damages for pain and suffering are improper in actions under the Kansas Acts *777Against Discrimination. K.S.A. 44-1005 authorizes the commission “to take such affirmative action, including but not limited to . . .” the various remedies provided therein. The majority opinion defies that statute by restricting the remedies available to a victim of discrimination. It limits the remedies in spite of the specific recognition in K.S.A. 44-1042 that the commission may include “an award of compensatory damages in any final order . . .” and in spite of the legislative direction, contained in K.S.A. 44-1037, that “[t]he provisions of this act shall be construed liberally for the accomplishment of the purposes thereof.” The stated purposes of the Act are the elimination of discrimination in employment and the assurance of equal opportunity for all. Since compensatory damages are authorized under the Kansas Acts Against Discrimination it follows that damages for pain and suffering may be awarded as well. Compensatory damages are defined as damages in satisfaction of, or in recompense for loss or injury sustained. The term covers all loss recoverable as a matter of right and includes all damages other than punitive or exemplary damages. 22 Am. Jur. 2d, Damages § 11, pp. 26-27. See also Koch v. Merchants Mutual Bonding Co., 211 Kan. 397, 401, 507 P.2d 189 (1973). Damages for pain and suffering are merely a species of damages awarded for a particular type of injury. Without question the term compensatory damages includes damages for pain and suffering.
I take particular umbrage at the majority’s statement: “Awarding damages for pain and suffering in discrimination cases is in truth nothing more than assessing punitive damages, for there are no physical injuries out of which pain and suffering arise.” This is a clear misconception of the nature of damages for pain and suffering, implying they must arise out of physical trauma. Not so. 25 C.J.S., Damages § 63 states:
“Mental pain and suffering in connection with a wrong which, apart from such pain and suffering, constitutes a cause of action is a proper element of damages where it is the natural and proximate consequence of the wrong.
“Where an allowance is made for mental pain and suffering, it is an element of actual or compensatory, as distinguished from exemplary or punitive, damages; the award is made as a matter of right and not of discretion, and the grounds for an allowance of exemplary damages need not be present.” pp. 815-16.
Damages for mental pain and suffering are neither the derivative of physical trauma nor the equivalent of punitive damages. Instead they are a form of compensatory damages which focus on *778the victim. Punitive damages, on the other hand, are given as an enhancement of compensatory damages to punish the defendant. Clearly the Kansas Commission on Civil Rights has statutory authority to award damages for mental pain and suffering where justified by the evidence.
The most unfortunate consequence of the majority’s refusal to follow the legislative mandate of K.S.A. 44-1037 coupled with its reaching out to give an advisory opinion on damages after the case is disposed of on burden of proof is the negative impression created which will be interpreted as this court retreating from its commitment to civil rights. Such an interpretation is understandable in light of the spotted history of civil rights in this country and the constant gap between promise and performance. At times the pendulum has swung toward the fulfillment of that promise; most often, however, it has turned the other way. Following 200 years of slavery and its devastating effect on both slave and free man, the Civil War was fought, resulting in the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Those amendments transformed the concept of equal justice into a constitutional right and authorized Congress to enact appropriate legislation to give effect to the newly recognized rights. These amendments constituted the first changes in the Constitution in over sixty years. They were followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Anti-Peonage Act (1867), the Enforcement Act of 1870, the Force Act of 1871, the Ku Klux Act (1871), and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. These were the so-called Reconstruction Statutes which were intended to insure to the Negro all the civil rights possessed by other citizens. The pendulum had swung far toward the black man. Imagine his joy and exaltation on being miraculously transformed from a propertyless, illiterate chattel into a free man with all the rights of a citizen. His expectations were lifted to the heights only to be summarily dashed by reality in a short period of time.
The post-war amendments and civil rights legislation failed to meet their promise of securing equality for the Negro. In the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36, 21 L.Ed. 394 (1873), the Supreme Court effectively read the privileges and immunities clause out of the 14th Amendment. According to the Slaughter-House court, the privileges and immunities clause did not transform the rights of citizens of each state into rights of *779national citizenship enforceable as such in the federal courts. Instead, it only protected against state encroachment those rights “which owe their existence to the federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.” p. 79. The rights protected, the court said, were solely those which would not have existed but for the presence of the federal government. Rights which did not owe their existence to the federal government were privileges and immunities only of state citizenship. The right to earn a livelihood was such a right and was thus not protected by the 14th Amendment. In spite of the constitutional amendments and the implementing statutes, the Court had restored states’ rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the most important of the Reconstruction statutes designed to insure equal rights for blacks. It climaxed a decade of congressional efforts to elevate the ideal of racial equality to the legal place, prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations and jury duty. It did not take long, however, for the courts to gut the act. In the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 27 L.Ed. 835, 3 S.Ct. 18 (1883), the Supreme Court ruled the prohibition unconstitutional, holding that the enforcement section of the 14th Amendment was limited to “state action” and that Congress could not reach private discriminatory action. Under this decision and that of Slaughter-House, the reach of the 14th Amendment was significantly limited. Civil rights were left to the states for protection. Expectations of black citizens were step-by-step being dashed.
Next came Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 41 L.Ed. 256, 16 S.Ct. 1138 (1896). This case grew out of a Louisiana statute requiring separate accommodations for blacks and whites on trains. In spite of the obviously discriminatory intent, the Supreme Court upheld the law. Under the 14th Amendment, the court stated, “separate but equal” facilities were sufficient. The post-war amendments and statutes were now virtually obliterated. Discrimination was rampant. Segregation became worse than during slavery. The states passed voter qualification statutes which successfully eliminated the black man’s vote. He had no power. He had no hope for economic betterment. His schools were inferior. He was truly an “invisible man.”
This condition existed until 1954 when the Supreme Court *780declared in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 98 L.Ed. 873, 74 S.Ct. 686 (1954):
“ ‘Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[Iy] integrated school-system.’ ” p. 494.
Richard Kluger in Simple Justice (1976), says of Brown:
“It was not only how many people the decision affected that mattered; it was the way it affected them — inside. Having proclaimed the equality of all men in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s founders had then elected, out of deference to the slaveholding South, to omit that definition of equalitarian democracy from the Constitution. It took a terrible civil war to correct that omission. But the Civil War amendments were soon drained of their original intention to lift the black man to meaningful membership in American society. The Court itself would do much to assist in that process, and Plessy was its most brutal blow. Congress passed no civil-rights laws after the Court-eviscerated one of 1875, and those that remained on the books were largely ignored by the states and unenforced by federal administrations that ranged in their attitudes from the racism of the Wilson regime to the largely ineffectual friendship of the Truman presidency. Since the expedient demolition of Reconstruction, white America had lost enthusiasm for the ennobling language of equalitarianism. The Negro, technically liberated from bondage, was expected to shift on his own. But he was no more welcomed in the North and the West than he was embraced in the South, which derived a perverse solace for its own troubled fortunes by kicking around his black hide. Denied high skills or advanced learning, he remained a superfluous and lower order of American being, excess baggage in the nation’s rush to prosperity and greatness. At most, he was there to keep the American dream brightly polished and fetch cool libations for its white beneficiaries. The law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, had pronounced it permissible — indeed, it was normal and expected — to degrade black America.
“It was into this moral void that the Supreme Court under Earl Warren now stepped. Its opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, for all its economy, represented nothing short of a reconsecration of American ideals. At a moment when the country had just begun to sense the magnitude of its global ideological contest with Communist authoritarianism and was quick to measure its own worth in terms of megaton power, the opinion of the Court said that the United States still stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate. ‘What the Justices have done,’ editorialized the Cincinnati Enquirer, ‘is simply to act as the conscience of the American nation.’ The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that that ascent had been made over the backs of black America — and that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.
*781“The reaction within the black community was muted. There was no dancing on the tables in Harlem. Race leaders such as Ralph Bunche were pleased but cautious in their comments. Commendatory editorials appeared throughout the black press, to be sure, along with calls for prayers of thanksgiving, but the mood of overall wariness in colored America was suggested by the Courier’s columnist Nat D. Williams, writing out of Beale Street in Memphis. ‘There was no general “hallelujah, ‘tis done,” hullabaloo on Beale Street over the Supreme Court’s admission that segregation in the public schools is wrong,’ wrote Williams. ‘Beale Streeters are sorta skeptical about giving out with cheers yet.’ Too many proclamations of white America’s good intentions had reached black America’s ears in the past to permit premature celebration now. There was added hesitation, no doubt, in expressing open glee lest it be taken as a sign of gratitude and thereby provide whites the emotional satisfaction over a deed well done. For, upon analysis, all the Supreme Court had truly and at long last granted to the black man was simple justice.” pp. 709-10.
The pendulum had again begun to swing. The 1957 Civil Rights Act passed, followed by the 1964 Act and its 1972 amendments, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968. The states followed suit with Civil Rights Acts of their own. Kansas was truly a leader in this area, passing the original version of the K.A.A.D. in 1953. Black people began to register to vote and to exercise some political muscle. No sooner had conditions improved, however, than efforts began in an attempt to dilute those hard earned gains. The Southern Manifesto and the so-called “freedom of choice” plans were immediate responses. But the resistance continues today in a more subtle manner. For example, the private school movement and the anti-busing crusade are in large part racially motivated. Those opposed to busing as a tool to achieve public school desegregation were not nearly so vocal when buses were used to insure segregation.
The government policy previously discussed offers a promise of equal opportunity in education, employment and public accommodations. There are still those, however, who would forestall the implementation of this promise. Blacks and other minorities are aware of that threat. They understand the code words for discrimination such as “states’ rights,” “neighborhood school,” “local control” and are apprehensive.
It is not the purpose of this dissent to question the good intentions or motives of the majority; the purpose is to point out its opinion will be interpreted as a weakening of judicial resolve on civil rights, a resolve upon which blacks are dependent. Judicial action has historically set racial policy. Dred Scott v. *782Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 Howard) 393, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857), was instrumental in triggering the Civil War by removing all hope of citizenship for Black persons. Then came Slaughter-House, Civil Rights Cases and Plessy, successfully destroying the post-war amendments and statutes resulting in rampant prejudice fully countenanced by the courts. Finally, in Brown the court recognized the constitutional guarantees as a commitment to human rights. It marked a turning point in America’s willingness to face the consequences of centuries of racial discrimination. The public attitude began to change. Civil rights legislation followed. Conditions improved, but continued improvement in racial relations is dependent upon the leadership of the judiciary. Since a majority in this country is white and inclined toward race prejudice, the executive and legislative branches of government are prone to reflect the demands of their constituency. Fair treatment for minorities is dependent upon the Constitution. The judiciary as guardian of the Constitution is the last refuge of the oppressed. To prevent this court’s action from being interpreted as prejudicial I would follow the statute and permit an award of damages for pain and suffering under the Kansas Acts Against Discrimination.