Court Opinion

ID: 9641101
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:23:15.875339+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:35.064166
License: Public Domain

DOGGETT, Justice,
concurring and dissenting.
The concurring and dissenting opinion of December 19, 1990 is withdrawn and the following is substituted.
The court creates an arbitrary restraint barring Julia Reagan from recovering damages the jury found to represent the mental anguish she suffered as a result of a disabling injury to her father. When a parent is rendered child-like as a result of a tragic incident, the child suffers myriad injuries. In this family relationship turned upside-down, the child is burdened prematurely and unexpectedly with the obligation to care for the parent and is deprived of *489the important emotional and financial support of life’s earliest role model. The child takes on this responsibility concomitantly with the sorrow and grief that must be faced on a daily basis in seeing the parent’s greatly diminished mental and physical capacities.
By failing to recognize the full nature of this injury to the family unit, the court draws an arbitrary line advocated by none of the parties to this litigation. While I concur in that portion of the court’s opinion expressly recognizing a cause of action for loss of parental consortium, and implicitly a consortium action by a parent upon injury of a child, I dissent from the denial of recovery for mental anguish damages.
Refusal to recognize mental anguish damages runs counter to decisions of this court in recent years that have sought to create a comprehensive and consistent system of damages for torts resulting in personal injury or death and to dismantle artificial barriers to the recovery of damages for mental anguish. In Sanchez v. Schindler, 651 S.W.2d 249 (Tex.1983), this court considered whether parents’ damages arising from the death of a child should continue to be limited to the amount of financial support the child, if living, would have provided to the parent less the cost of the child’s care, support and education. The court rejected this “antiquated” pecuniary loss standard that excluded consideration of the “real loss” sustained by the parent— the injury to the familial relationship:
This court has recognized previously that injuries to the familial relationship are significant injuries and are worthy of compensation.
Id. at 251, 252 (emphasis supplied).
This court in Sanchez did not limit recovery to loss of consortium damages. Conscious of the realities of the nature of the injiiries suffered when the family is shattered by a tragic incident, we recognized that:
The destruction of the parent-child relationship results in mental anguish, and it would be unrealistic to separate injury to the familial relationship from emotional injury.
Id. at 253 (emphasis supplied).1 Based on these accurate and poignant observations, the court permitted recovery of damages for mental anguish when the familial relationship has been destroyed.
It is no less unrealistic to separate injury to the familial relationship from emotional injury when the destruction of the relationship is substantial but less than complete. The logic of Sanchez is not diminished when death is replaced with disabling injury. Our discussion of mental anguish in Moore v. Lillebo, 722 S.W.2d 683 (Tex.1986), failed to draw such an insupportable distinction. Stating that “mental anguish inheres in the nature of certain torts,” we recognized that “an emotional reaction ... is a natural by-product of injury to the familial relationship.” 722 S.W.2d at 685 (emphasis supplied). See also id. at 686 (“the substance of the recovery is for emotional damage to the family unit”).
The court turns to semantics to justify the result, reciting that previously approved actions for loss of consortium do not encompass recovery for mental anguish. A definition of loss of consortium that excludes damages for mental anguish, see, e.g. id. at 687-88, in no way precludes recovery for loss of consortium and mental anguish damages in the same lawsuit. We allow recovery for both in actions for wrongful death. See, e.g., id.; Sanchez, 651 S.W.2d at 251.
The second excuse offered for today’s misguided result is that recovery of mental anguish damages would conflict with the “bystander recovery rule.”2 Sanchez ex*490plicitly rejected a similar argument, concluding that “there is no requirement that the plaintiff be within the zone of danger or have witnessed the accident in order to recover for mental anguish.” 651 S.W.2d at 254 n. 6. Whether the rationale of Sanchez should apply to injury actions was not presented in Freeman v. City of Pasadena, 744 S.W.2d 923 (Tex.1988). There recovery was denied for mental anguish to a stepfather who was not at or near the scene of the accident at the time it occurred but arrived later to witness his stepson in a severely injured condition. Our decision was limited solely to the claim for emotional distress induced by the apprehension of negligently caused injury to another. Freeman did not, however, address a claim for damages arising from the separate and distinct tort of injury to the familial relationship, nor did it cite or consider Sanchez, and it is therefore distinguishable.
A more considered approach, which would take into account Sanchez as well as the efforts of this court to remove arbitrary barriers to compensation for all of the actual elements of damage suffered, would allow recovery for mental anguish. Apparently the only court to have previously considered this precise question has determined that permitting such damages for injury to the familial relationship is not inconsistent with the rules governing bystander recovery. Jacobs v. Anderson Bldg. Co., 430 N.W.2d 558, 560 (N.D.1988).
This court has, in fact, affirmed an award of mental anguish damages suffered by parents as a result of an injury to their child in a situation in which the requirements of the bystander recovery rule were clearly not met. In Hall v. Birchfield, 718 S.W.2d 313, 337 (Tex.App.-Texarkana 1986), rev’d sub nom. Birchfield v. Texarkana Memorial Hosp., 747 S.W.2d 361 (Tex.1987), the parents of a premature baby were led to believe they were taking a well baby home from the hospital. Three weeks later they learned that the child was blind. 718 S.W.2d at 337. In the trial court, the parents were awarded damages for past and future mental anguish suffered by them “resulting from the blindness” of the child, as well as damages for “shock and emotional trauma” sustained by them upon learning of the child’s blindness. Id. This court, relying on Moore v. Lillebo, affirmed the court of appeals’ denial of recovery for shock and emotional trauma, as being duplicative of the mental anguish award. Birchfield v. Texarkana Memorial Hospital, 747 S.W.2d 361, 368-69 (Tex.1987). While there is nothing in our opinion, or in that of the court of appeals, to suggest that the parents had observed the child being injured, the mental anguish award was affirmed.
The court’s artificial separation of injury to the familial relationship from emotional injury contradicts our decision in Sanchez and defies the realities of the loss suffered by Julia Reagan, who must witness her father in a reduced mental state. Her emotional injuries should be compensated as well by permitting a recovery of mental anguish damages. I believe Texas law demands a more pro-family position than that which the court has adopted.
Justice Hecht’s lengthy concurrence and dissent should be viewed by all those concerned with the development of our common law and the preservation of our jury system as a warning shot across their bow. Raising concerns about “our already overburdened legal system,” supra at 487 (Hecht, J., concurring and dissenting), the dissenters have a swift solution: jurors stay home, victims seek solace elsewhere. Courts are too busy to dispense justice evenly.
Heavily masking its aspirations with a detailed description of the facts in this case, the opinion actually prefers to bar recovery to all — both the child of the town’s cherished minister and the child of a less well regarded citizen. The contorted logic that destroys the rights of these children also bars an individual’s recovery for the trauma naturally accompanying the wrongful death of a child or serious harm to a spouse that we previously approved in Sanchez, 651 S.W.2d 249, and Whittlesey v. Miller, 512 S.W.2d 665 (Tex.1978), as well *491as in any other action for noneconomic, human loss. The dissent’s real quarrel is not with this single case or this particular cause of action; it is with the substantial body of common law governing the tort system that has developed over the past one-hundred years, not just the last twenty as suggested by Justice Hecht.
The dissenters’ view stems from their suspicion and distrust of the concept of ordinary Texans, constituting a cross-section of their individual communities, assembling as a jury to make difficult determinations concerning the measure of noneco-nomic loss that sometimes tragically befalls a family. Their professed empathy is belied by epithets like “jackpot” and “lottery-like” that they apply to favorable jury findings for family members. Supra at 484.
The suggestion that one award returned by a Massachusetts jury, supra at 486 n. 17, demonstrates the weakness of the jury system is misleading. Juries may at times reach verdicts others term either outrageously excessive or paltry. Like any human endeavor, even authoring judicial opinions, errors are inevitable. But derogating the jury system does not solve the problem; it merely substitutes the judgment of legal experts regarding factual issues for that of a panel of citizens expert in the range of human experience. I prefer to respect jury decisions as the voice of the community and recognize that appellate courts exist to check egregious abuses.
That Justice Hecht is joined in full by one other justice, and in large part by another, bodes ill for Texas jurisprudence. Their real objective is steadily to erode the role of ordinary citizens as jurors in our system of justice and to deny Texans important rights.
MAUZY, J., joins this concurring and dissenting opinion.

. We further rejected arguments that the damage to the relationship is too difficult to assess: "Injuries resulting from mental anguish may actually be less nebulous than pain and suffering, or injuries resulting from loss of companionship and consortium." Sanchez v. Schindler, 651 S.W.2d 249, 253 (Tex.1983).

. Under that rule, a bystander may recover damages for mental anguish if (i) the plaintiff was located near the scene of an accident and not some distance from it, (ii) the shock resulted from a direct emotional impact from the plaintiffs sensory and contemporaneous observance of the accident and not from learning of it from others later, and (iii) the plaintiff and *490victim were closely related. Freeman v. City of Pasadena, 744 S.W.2d 923, 923-24 (Tex.1988).