Court Opinion

ID: 9723330
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 10:11:52.16266+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:47.067397
License: Public Domain

McDANIEL, J.
I respectfully dissent.
In the trial court the petitioning defendants’ motion for summary judgment was denied because the court perceived an issue of fact to be resolved. To the contrary, in my view, the case presents solely an issue of law, and the motion should have been granted. The trial court and the majority point to the issue of fact as being whether the defendants were negligent- in failing to lock the door against the intruder.
However, implicit in characterizing the record as presenting an issue of fact is an underlying and prior legal determination that a duty devolved upon the defendants to exercise some measure of care in maintaining the security of the mortuary premises. It is in their perception of the duty here applicable that I disagree with my colleagues.
*539In undertaking to define such a duty, the majority first invokes Dillon v. Legg (1968) 68 Cal.2d 728 [69 Cal.Rptr. 72, 441 P.2d 912, 29 A.L.R.3d 1316], which forthrightly conceded that “‘[duty] is a shorthand statement of a [legal] conclusion, rather than an aid to analysis in itself ... [and that] “duty” is not sacrosanct in itself, but only an expression of the sum total of those considerations of policy which lead the law to say that the particular plaintiff is entitled to protection.’ (Prosser, Law of Torts, ... at pp. 332-333.)” (Id. at p. 734.)
This proposition provides a large area in which to maneuver, but I suggest that such maneuvering cannot properly ignore precedent, particularly where the result reached here boldly leaps beyond the ramparts which have heretofore marked the outer limits of duty in personal injury cases sounding in tort.
Dillon itself was also such a case of new outreach and extended duty to a mother who witnessed her child run down in a cross walk by a careless motorist. Although the mother was never in the zone of danger, she suffered physical symptoms of distress as the result of the experience. On these facts, for reasons of policy sufficient to the Supreme Court, it was held that the driver was bound to foresee that a child struck in a cross walk might well be attended by a family member on the curb who would experience his or her own physical trauma as a consequence of witnessing the child’s agony.
In Vanguard Ins. Co. v. Schabatka (1975) 46 Cal.App.3d 887 [120 Cal.Rptr. 614], this court declined to extend any duty to a surviving husband for his own trauma in a case where his wife was killed in a cross walk in Buena Park, and where the husband was not present at the scene of the accident but only learned of his wife’s death 15 minutes later. In doing so, we followed Justice Tobriner’s carefully reasoned limitations upon further expansion of the concept of duty in circumstances of this kind. The Dillon guidelines clearly dictated the result in Vanguard and provide: “‘In determining, in such a case, whether defendant should reasonably foresee the injury to plaintiff, or, in other terminology, whether defendant owes plaintiff a duty of due care, the courts will take into account such factors as the following: (1) Whether plaintiff was located near the scene of the accident as contrasted with one who was a distance away from it. (2) Whether the shock resulted from a direct emotional impact upon plaintiff from the sensory and con*540temporaneous observance of the accident, as contrasted with learning of the accident from others after its occurrence. (3) Whether plaintiff and the victim were closely related, as contrasted with an absence of any relationship or the presence of only a distant relationship.’ [Quoting Dillon v. Legg, supra, 68 Cal.2d 728, 740.]” (Vanguard Ins. Co. v. Schabatka, supra, 46 Cal.App.3d 887, 898.)
Turning to the facts of the case now before us, it is apparent that they are on all fours with Vanguard. Mr. Thomas, the plaintiff, was not present when his deceased wife’s remains were desecrated. Without more, Vanguard should control, and once again in obedience, to the Tobriner guidelines, we should decline to extend the burden of liability for personal injuries into a new and uncharted area.
The majority’s response to this is that there is something more, i.e., a special relationship between the surviving husband and the mortuary. They seize upon this as raising a duty without alluding to any policy reasons as to why this should be.
In doing so, the majority rejects out of hand a line of cases of which 7735 Hollywood Blvd. Venture v. Superior Court (1981) 116 Cal.App.3d 901 [172 Cal.Rptr. 528], is illustrative. In that case a special relationship existed between the defendant and plaintiff. They were landlord and tenant respectively. The plaintiff was raped by a third party intruder into her apartment. In the litigation against the defendant landlord which followed, the causation for the rape suffered by plaintiff was alleged to be the negligent failure of defendant to replace a burned out light bulb outside plaintiff’s apartment.
In authorizing the issuance of a writ of mandate directing the trial court to sustain defendant’s demurrer, the Court of Appeal held that there was no legal basis upon which to undertake a factual inquiry into negligence because a landlord has no duty to take precautions against attacks by third persons which he has no reason to anticipate. (Id. at p. 905.)
In the case before us the declarations and other items of evidence before the court at the time the motion for summary judgment was heard and considered demonstrated conclusively that nothing like this had ever happened at the mortuary and that nothing had ever come to the *541attention of the defendants to suggest that such a regrettable event might occur.
The majority has seemingly attempted to distinguish between the types of relationship which do or do not call up a duty, doing so by pointing to cases where a duty has been imposed arguably because of the nature of the special relationship. Particularly, the majority quotes at length from Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California (1976) 17 Cal.3d 425 [131 Cal.Rptr. 14, 551 P.2d 334, 83 A.L.R.3d 1166]. In that case, one for wrongful death, the plaintiffs were the parents of a victim killed by a person who had revealed to a therapist associated with the university that he, the former, intended to kill the victim. Thereafter, the therapist did not warn the victim, and the court held this to be a breach of duty in that there was a failure to protect the known victim from danger.
In the first place, wrongful death cases import a unique and separate right of action in the survivors quite apart from any right arising from the harm visited upon the victim. However, beyond that I find no difficulty in distinguishing Tarasoff from our facts here. In the former, the identity of the possible victim was known to the therapist; thus a high degree of foreseeability was present there to an extent not even remotely present here. While, for policy reasons, there can occasionally be a reluctance to impose duty even in the face of foreseeability, it has never occurred that there has been duty imposed without foreseeability.
That is the crux of this case. It cannot be fairly argued that it was any more foreseeable that an intruder would enter the defendant mortuary than it was that the rapist would enter the apartment in Hollywood Blvd. In the latter case, where there was even a surviving victim of the crime, it was yet held that no duty existed in favor of a severely injured plaintiff in the absence of defendant’s knowledge of the third party criminal’s presence in the area together with further knowledge of his propensity to behave as he finally did.
This is the present state of the law in this state, and the majority has chosen to ignore it in a case where the plaintiff is even one step removed from the scene of the crime, this notwithstanding that Vanguard, in following the Dillon guidelines, declined to extend duty to a point so far beyond basic tort rationale. If this be done on the pretext *542of a so-called special relationship, even where foreseeability is entirely lacking, the quantum leap is in manifest derogation of both precedent and logic.
I would order issuance of the writ as prayed for.
Petitioners’ application for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied October 27, 1982.