Court Opinion

ID: 9656641
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 19:53:34.66191+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:33.968439
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN N. LIMBAUGH, JR., Judge,
dissenting.
This case presents some of the unintended and unforeseen consequences of this Court’s wrongly decided opinion in Schoemehl v. Treasurer of the State of Missouri, 217 S.W.3d 900 (Mo. banc 2007). I joined in the dissent in that case, and I dissent in this case, as well. Schoemehl was wrongly decided because under section 287.200.1, RSMo 2000, permanent total disability payments are only payable “during the continuance of such disability for the lifetime of the employee....” Id. at 902; Id. at 905 (Stith, J. dissenting). For this reason, Schoemehl should be overturned.
According to the majority analysis in Schoemehl, the surviving dependents of an injured employee with permanent total disability will continue to collect workers’ compensation payments by virtue of a provision in section 287.020.1, which states, “[a]ny reference to any employee who has been injured shall, when the employee is dead, also include his dependents.... ” *604The holding of Schoemehl makes clear that the payments are not tied to the death of the employee, but continue to his or her dependents, who themselves are then considered the employees. But if that is true, there is no basis to tie the payments in this case to the fact that the employee died while the case was still pending. Nonetheless, the majority now holds that “the question of whether the children may receive the permanent total disability payment after the death of their mother is dependent on whether the mother’s claim was final — or was still pending — at the time of her death.” To be consistent with Schoemehl, however, the only course is to allow the substitution of the decedent’s dependents and continue the payments after the decedent’s death without regard to the pendency of the original action. Certainly there is nothing in the statute on which Schoemehl relied that limits payments only to those dependents with the perverse good fortune of having their decedents die while the case was still pending.
Furthermore, the majority’s conclusion that payments to dependents who did not move to intervene while the original case was still pending would constitute the “retrospective application of the laws” is wholly off the mark. The prohibition against retrospective application of the laws pertains solely to laws that are enacted after the conduct to which they purport to apply. Mo. Const. art. I, sec. 13 (“[N]o ... law ... retrospective in its operation ... can be enacted.”); Jane Doe I v. Phillips, 194 S.W.3d 833, 850 (Mo. banc 2006). And here, of course, section 287.020.1 was on the books well before decedent’s injury.
That is not to say that I disagree with the majority’s holding that the operation of Schoemehl is prospective only; my disagreement instead pertains to the majority’s (and the concurrence’s) treatment of post-Schoemehl cases. As I understand the majority and concurring positions, the dependents of an injured employee can only collect after the death of the employee if they, themselves, were part of the lawsuit. If not, the judgment awarding benefits to the injured employee will not carry over to the dependents. This is a wholly inequitable resolution because the identity of the dependents of the injured employee will, in most cases, change between the time the judgment was final and the date of the employee’s death. Indeed, in many cases, an injured employee’s dependents may not even exist at the time the judgment was entered. So in my mind, if Schoemehl is to be followed, all post-Schoemehl judgments should include, as a matter of law, all dependents of the employee at the time of the employee’s death, whether or not those dependents were expressly named in the judgment. Although the concurrence is correct that “there is no precedent for reopening final awards in workers’ compensation cases,” to identify those dependents, one equitable solution, at least, is to allow them to assert their dependency and entitlement to payments via a writ of mandamus directed to the state treasurer.
Ultimately, the distinction made by the majority — that dependents do collect if their decedents die while the case is still pending but do not collect if their decedents die after the case is finalized — is simply a poor invention designed, I suspect, in an effort to minimize the mischief caused by the bad decision in Schoemehl. Unfortunately, the majority’s holding compounds the mischief more than it comprises a cure. The cure is to overturn Schoe-mehl.