Court Opinion

ID: 9657864
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 20:39:53.11769+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:49.021133
License: Public Domain

Caporale, J.,
concurring in part, and in part dissenting.
I concur in the judgments in favor of the children, but must dissent with respect to the judgments in favor of the parents. I do so on two grounds.
First, although the State and its agents’ indifference and negligence in this case are unfathomable, the parents were nonetheless themselves guilty of contributory negligence sufficient to bar their recovery as a matter of law. For the parents to have permitted the foster child to care for their children for any period of time, no matter how brief or under what circumstances, within a few weeks after they learned he had sexually assaulted one of their children is as inexplicable as the conduct of the State and its agents.
Second, the majority erroneously and dangerously extends the ill-advised bystander recovery rule adopted in James v. Lieb, 221 Neb. 47, 375 N.W.2d 109 (1985). James'held only that one alleging that he helplessly watched his sister get hit, run over, and killed by a negligently operated truck, as the result of which he became physically ill and suffered, and would continue to suffer, mental anguish and emotional distress, had stated a cause of action in tort, notwithstanding that he had not alleged that he himself had been within the zone of danger.
In so holding, the James majority recognized that such bystander recovery depended upon a defendant’s adjudicated liability and fault for the injury or death of the victim because without such fault, there would be no foundation for the tort-feasor’s duty of care to third parties, a duty depending upon the foreseeability of the risk. However, ignoring the rule that the language of a judicial opinion must be read in the context of the facts under consideration and its meaning limited by those facts, Abbott v. Gould, Inc., 232 Neb. 907, 443 N.W.2d 591 (1989), the James majority went on to muse about a number of things ancillary to its holding.
It anticipated that there would be no need for a physical *905injury to the plaintiff. It also ruminated about the kind of connection which would be required between the plaintiff and the victim and speculated that the connection was to be measured not by a certain degree of consanguinity but, rather, by whether there existed a marital or some other undefined intimate familial relationship. With scant focus on the requisite nature of the plaintiff’s reaction to the victim’s hurt, the James majority nonetheless pondered the type of hurt which would bring the bystander rule into play and foreshadowed the need for either death or serious injury of an unspecified character. It also acknowledged that how the victim’s hurt entered into the consciousness of the plaintiff would be a factor in determining whether the rule applied, but blissfully avoided further meditation on the subject except to quote with approval from Ferriter v. Daniel O’Connell’s Sons, Inc., 381 Mass. 507, 518, 413 N.E.2d 690, 697 (1980):
A plaintiff who rushes onto the accident scene and finds a loved one injured has no greater entitlement to compensation for that shock than a plaintiff who rushes instead to the hospital. So long as the shock follows closely on the heels of the accident, the two types of injury are equally foreseeable.
It is clear that if the bystander rule is to be applied to any familial relationship, it cannot be argued that it should not be applied between a parent and his or her minor children living in the parent’s household. However, even assuming that no physical injury is required and that, in this case, the parents’ emotional distress was “so severe that no reasonable person could be expected to endure” it, Dale v. Thomas Funeral Home, 237 Neb. 528, 532, 466 N.W.2d 805, 808 (1991) (involving the intentional infliction of emotional distress), and further assuming that the harm to the children constitutes a sufficiently severe injury, the bystander recovery rule still does not apply. This is so because the children’s hurt did not enter into the parents’ consciousness with the sudden and traumatic impact the rule requires.
The court in Schurk v. Christensen, 80 Wash. 2d 652, 497 P.2d 937 (1972), denied recovery for the negligent infliction of mental anguish and distress to the parents of a 5-year-old girl, *906one of whom was told that the girl had been sexually assaulted several times during the preceding 4 or 5 months by the defendants’ 15-year-old son, who served as the girl’s babysitter. However, the Supreme Court permitted the cause to proceed against the babysitter on the theory he intentionally inflicted emotional distress upon the girl’s parents. In so ruling, the Schurk court reasoned that as to the negligent infliction of mental anguish and distress claim, the parents had not met the requirement that their shock resulted from a direct emotional impact upon them from the sensory and contemporaneous perception of the assaults.
For further examples of the application of the requirement that there be a contemporaneous sensory perception of the victim’s hurt, see, e.g., Mazzagatti v. Everingham by Everingham, 512 Pa. 266, 516 A.2d 672 (1986) (recovery denied where parent, approximately a mile away, arrived at accident scene after child’s injury resulting in death); Nutter v. Frisbie Mem. Hosp., 124 N.H. 791, 474 A.2d 584 (1984) (recovery denied where parents claiming child died as result of emergency room malpractice arrived after child’s death); Capareo v. Lambert, 121 R.I. 710, 402 A.2d 1180 (1979) (recovery denied to parent who did not witness accident in which child injured); Shelton v. Russell Pipe & Foundry Co., 570 S.W.2d 861 (Tenn. 1978) (recovery denied to parents who neither visually nor aurally witnessed accident in which child injured, but learned of it through reports of third parties considerable time afterward); Baas v. Hoye, 766 F.2d 1190 (8th Cir. 1985) (applying Iowa law, denied recovery to parent who did not see child ingest improperly bottled medication); Bloom v. Dubois Regional Medical Ctr., _ Pa. Super. _, 597 A.2d 671 (1991) (husband who found wife hanging in hospital failed to state a cause of action for negligent infliction of emotioned distress, as he had not observed traumatic infliction of injury); McKethean v. WMATA, 588 A.2d 708 (D.C. 1991) (denied recovery to plaintiff who was block away when automobile struck his daughter, granddaughter, and friends); Fife v. Astenias, 232 Cal. App. 3d 1090, 284 Cal. Rptr. 16 (1991) (denied recovery to automobile accident victim’s parents and brothers who, even if were considered to be at scene by *907virtue of rushing to street within seconds of hearing impact, did not know at time accident occurred that victim was being injured); Freeman v. City of Pasadena, 744 S.W.2d 923 (Tex. 1988) (recovery denied to stepparent who arrived at scene after stepchildren injured and neither saw nor otherwise contemporaneously perceived accident); Crenshaw v. Sarasota County Public Hosp. Bd., 466 So. 2d 427 (Fla. App. 1985) (recovery denied, to parent of stillborn child who did not see body which was mutilated after it was inadvertently placed with hospital laundry); and Perlmutter v Whitney, 60 Mich. App. 268, 230 N.W.2d 390 (1975) (recovery denied to parents who neither saw nor were near scene of accident where child was injured).
The parents here neither saw nor heard any assault taking place; rather, they acquired their after-the-fact knowledge of the occurrences through the reports of third persons, and their distress was so slow in developing that they permitted the foster child to provide care for all their children over a period of weeks. Under these circumstances, it cannot reasonably be said that they suffered their distress as the result of a direct emotional impact from the sensory and contemporaneous perception of the assaults.
I fear the majority opinion in this case is but another illustration of the observation that hard cases make bad law. Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 24 S. Ct. 436, 48 L. Ed. 679 (1904) (Holmes, J., dissenting).
Hastings, C.J., and Boslaugh, J., join in this concurrence and dissent.