Court Opinion

ID: 9588556
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:35:42.969823+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:59.583089
License: Public Domain

CHIEF JUSTICE CARRICO,
with whom JUSTICE COMPTON joins, dissenting.
While the majority affirms the judgment appealed from, it holds that the trial court had no “authority to ‘discharge’ the hospital’s 1985 judgment.” I agree with that holding. Yet, the majority proceeds to discharge the judgment in part by holding that the funds received by the plaintiff are “immune from the claims of the other parties to the apportionment.” I cannot agree with that holding.
If the trial court had no power to discharge the judgment in toto, from whence comes the power of the majority to discharge it in part? Certainly not from the apportionment language of Code § 8.01-66.9, which the majority assigns as the sole source of its authority. As the majority notes, “apportion” means to “divide and assign in just proportion ... to allot.” On the other hand, “to discharge [a] debt or claim is to extinguish it, to annul its obligatory force, to satisfy it.” Black’s Law Dictionary 416 (5th ed. 1979).
The majority says that, if the judgment lienor is permitted to seize the share of the recovery apportioned to the plaintiff in this case, the “legislative purpose is subverted, and the ‘mischief at which the 1981 amendment [to Code § 8.01-66.9] was directed remains without redress.”
But this Court is confined to the language the General Assembly used in attempting to deal with the mischief, and, if that language is insufficient for the purpose, so be it.