Court Opinion

ID: 9477239
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:18:11.063231+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:46.347293
License: Public Domain

*993SLOVITER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree that the district court erred in rejecting the government’s affirmative defense of the statute of limitations, but because my analysis differs somewhat from that of Judge Cowen, I write separately.
It is undisputed that as a result of his Army experience in Korea, plaintiff John Barren suffers from a disability, which the district court described as chronic anxiety disorder. App. at 56. Indeed, the Veteran’s Administration awarded plaintiff a thirty percent disability rating retroactive to February 26, 1973, increased it to fifty percent as of August 23, 1977, and awarded him 100% disability on October 18, 1984. At issue here is not whether plaintiff had an unfortunate service-connected disability, or when it became totally disabling, but whether plaintiff is entitled to damages of $1,124,000 awarded him by the district court for defendant’s malpractice.
Plaintiff’s tort claim, in essence, is that the malpractice of the United States was committed between August 1972 and April 1974 when Dr. George Anghel misdiagnosed Barren’s condition as a mere adolescent adjustment reaction and prescribed tranquilizers rather than the appropriate treatment of hospitalization which had been requested by John’s sister, Henrietta, who consulted directly with Dr. Anghel on John’s behalf.
The Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA) provides that:
A tort claim against the United States shall be forever barred unless it is presented in writing to the appropriate Federal agency within two years after such claim accrues....
28 U.S.C. § 2401(b) (1982).
Barren must show that his claim accrued less than two years before presentation of his claim. Barren’s administrative claim was not presented to the United States until September 7,1979. His sister also presented her own claim on that date for medical expenses made on his behalf.
As the district court correctly recognized, “a claim under the FTCA accrues when a plaintiff knows both the existence and cause of his injury,” citing to United States v. Kubrick, 444 U.S. 111, 122-23, 100 S.Ct. 352, 359-60, 62 L.Ed.2d 259 (1979). App. at 30. Applying this rule, the district court held that the claim of Henrietta Barren in her own right was barred by the statute of limitations because there was no evidence why she did not discover or through the exercise of reasonable diligence should not have discovered the injury claimed and its cause. App. at 33.
The district court, however, distinguished between Henrietta and John Barren. The court held that John Barren’s “mental condition affected his ability to understand that” the Veteran’s Administration aggravated the injury that he had suffered as a result of his tour of duty in Korea. App. at 32-33. According to the district court, “plaintiff’s mental condition at the time of the allegedly negligent conduct, and which resulted from that conduct, may be considered part of the external circumstances under which the reasonableness of a plaintiff’s diligence in discovering the wrong must be assessed.” App. at 32. Although I recognize the attractiveness of this position, I believe it runs counter to the applicable law and legal precedents.
Plaintiff concedes that “with limited exceptions not applicable here, the existence of a mental capacity [sic] does not toll the running of the statute of limitations under the FTCA.” Brief for appellee at 24 (footnote omitted). Nonetheless, plaintiff argues that the district court was justified in considering plaintiff’s mental incapacity as “one of the many factors” to be weighed in determining the reasonableness of plaintiff’s diligence in discovering the cause of his injury.
The distinction made by the district court is illusory. The basis for the general rule that the statute of limitations will not be tolled for either infancy or insanity, see 2 L. Jayson, Handling Federal Tort Claims: Administrative and Judicial Remedies §§ 297.02-.03 (1987), stems from the prevailing reasonable person standard used to determine when the claim, particularly a medical malpractice claim, should have been discovered. See, e.g., Kubrick, 444 U.S. at 123 n. 10, 100 S.Ct. at 360 n. 10 *994(plaintiff must exercise “reasonable diligence”); Urland v. Merrell-Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 822 F.2d 1268, 1275 (3d Cir.1987) (Pennsylvania inquiry is “whether plaintiffs knew or reasonably should have known”). The standard is an objective one, consistent with the purpose of the FTCA to “encourage the prompt presentation of claims.” Kubrick, 444 U.S. at 117, 100 S.Ct. at 357. Neither the plaintiff nor the district court cites any persuasive authority for applying a subjective standard, i. e., reasonableness as viewed from the plaintiffs individual situation. In fact, precisely such a subjective standard was rejected in Kubrick, where the Supreme Court, in reversing this court’s holding of when a claim accrued for purposes of the FTCA statute of limitations, held an “untutored plaintiff” to the same standard as a “reasonable person”. See id. at 118, 100 S.Ct. at 357.1
Inclusion of a plaintiffs mental incapacity as a factor to be considered in determining the reasonableness of plaintiffs diligence runs counter to this general approach. Indeed in this case, the only factor that distinguished plaintiffs situation from that of his sister was his mental incapacity. Since that interposes an impermissible subjective element into the reasonable person standard, see Restatement (Second) of Torts, §§ 283B, 283C (1964), the district court’s reliance on the plaintiff’s mental incapacity was legal error.
Plaintiff also argues that the usual discovery rule should be relaxed because “the injury sustained by [him] at the hands of the defendant was an aggravation of a pre-existing condition.” Brief of Appellee at 29. I fail to see how a principled distinction can be made for purposes of the statute of limitations between a plaintiff whose mental disability was caused by defendant’s negligence and one whose mental disability was aggravated by defendant’s negligence. In either case, plaintiff’s failure to file a timely claim may have resulted from his or her inability to recognize or appreciate the factors which form the basis of the claim. Logic requires that both situations should be treated similarly. Since both the district court and plaintiff concede that mental disability as such is not a basis for relaxing the statute of limitations, it follows that aggravation of that mental disability cannot afford such a basis.
It may be that when the negligence of the defendant impairs the ability of a plaintiff to take the necessary measures to file a claim, fairness requires that we relax the rule.2 That, however, is an issue for Congress. We cannot, as the dissent suggests, change the statute in order “to circumvent the obvious injustice of the result.” Dissent op. at 997. Indeed, in Zeleznik v. United States, 770 F.2d 20, 24 (3d Cir.1985), this court, applying Kubrick, noted that the two-year limitations period in the FTCA reflects Congress’ determination of what is a reasonable time for injured parties to make a claim. We commented that “the statute of limitations is meant to be *995applied in a uniform manner,” and that the statute “does not guarantee that every injured party will necessarily be able to find and make a claim against a possibly responsible governmental agency.” Id.
Because the only basis for the district court’s failure to apply the FTCA’s statute of limitations was Barren’s mental incapacity, and that is an impermissible basis, I also vote to reverse the judgment for plaintiff entered by the district court.

. Both the district court and plaintiff rely on the district court’s opinion in Greenberg v. McCabe, 453 F.Supp. 765, 768 (E.D.Pa.1978), aff'd, 594 F.2d 854 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 840, 100 S.Ct. 78, 62 L.Ed.2d 51 (1979), where the court held that plaintiffs mental condition is a factor to be weighed in determining the time of discovery. Greenberg preceded the Supreme Court’s decision in Kubrick which rejected use of a subjective factor.

. All parties agree that this case is unlike the coma situation, see, e.g., Washington v. United States, 769 F.2d 1436, 1438-39 (9th Cir.1985), and Clifford by Clifford v. United States, 738 F.2d 977, 979-80 (8th Cir.1984), and hence we need not reach that issue. However, in light of the dissent’s extensive reliance on these cases, we note that even in those cases the courts distinguished the extraordinary situation presented when plaintiff has been in a coma or has been lobotomized from a case such as this alleging some lesser level of mental incapacity. See, e.g., Zeidler v. United States, 601 F.2d 527, 531 (10th Cir.1979) (“We say also that brain damage or destruction is not to be classified in the same way as ordinary mental disease or insanity for the purpose of barring such an action"). See also Dundon v. United States, 559 F.Supp. 469, 474 (E.D.N.Y.1983). Although Judge Becker reads Clifford by Clifford v. United States, 738 F.2d 977 (8th Cir.1984), differently than do I, I note that Clifford quoted verbatim the language of Dundon, expressly interposing the reference to Allen Clifford and describing his "extraordinary situation.” Id. at 980. The court in Clifford, as in the two cases cited above, distinguished Allen Clifford’s situation from that of ordinary mental incapacity. Id.