Court Opinion

ID: 9615238
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:33:07.935166+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:43.676520
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice,
concurring.
Concurring in what Justice Johnson has written, and not disagreeing with the views of Judge McKee, my purpose in writing separately is to raise a semantical question: Is our holding that Thompson and the two Martin cases, upon which the Commission relied in disclaiming jurisdiction in this Smith case, are no longer governing the equivalent of an unequivocal overruling of Thompson and the Martin cases, thus casting them into a well deserved and long overdue oblivion?
As a side note, there was not a Martin I and a Martin II.2 The opinions in both of those cases were released simultaneously, on December 9, 1965. Neither case was a sequel to the other. In the case where the Industrial Accident Board ruled itself not possessed of jurisdiction, it relied solely on the Thompson case. In the companion *129case, the district court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction by declaring itself precluded on the basis that the Industrial Commission decision raised the bar of res judicata.
The Supreme Court properly ruled for Martin on the appeal in the latter Martin case, and the judgment of dismissal was reversed and the cause remanded to the district court for trial. Argonaut’s tactics plus Commission error and district court error successfully kept the injured worker and his family impoverished for years, and all that time denied Richard Martin the corrective surgery which was desperately needed. For the reader who wants to learn of the gross deprivation of “sure and certain relief” which devastated the Martin family for not just months but years, one need only turn to Heese3 and peruse the content of 102 Idaho at 605 n. 5, 635 P.2d at 969 n. 5. Further informative reading will be found in the analysis of the Thompson case at 102 Idaho at 603, 635 P.2d at 967.

. Had the Industrial Commission not followed this Court's poorly founded Thompson holding, there might have been no necessity for either of the two Martin cases, and for certain no occasion for the second one. Thompson was the real culprit. The district court’s res judicata ruling was in strong second place.

. On rereading Heese and indulging in retrospect, one wonders why and how it was that four members of this Court gave considerable attention to Thompson and the two Martin cases, but were, and remained completely unaware of the tendered invitation to overrule that trilogy which was contained in a comprehensive special concurrence.