Court Opinion

ID: 9581777
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:18:44.408147+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:37:14.972337
License: Public Domain

ALMA WILSON, Justice,
dissenting:
The Court of Appeals, in remanding this case to the Workers’ Compensation Court, on May 21, 1985, stated that the final Order of the Workers’ Compensation Court was facially defective. The Workers’ Compensation Court had failed to cite in its Order the statutory language that the trial judge’s finding was “against the clear weight of the evidence.”
Rather than simply correcting the facial defect in form by issuing an Order nunc pro tunc advising the appellate court of the basis upon which the trial judge’s order had been vacated, the Workers’ Compensation Court, in substance, re-tried the case. It did not correct the prior Order in conformity with the intent of the Court of Appeals’ instructions, but instead promulgated an entirely new Order. Such went far beyond the mandate of the appellate court; and the re-trial of the case constituted an unauthorized act on the part of the Workers’ Compensation Court.
The defect which required correction on remand was neither jurisdictional, nor cognizable as an substantive error of law, but purely facial in character. Irregularity in the form of the Order is properly amendable. It did not make the Order void, subject to vacation and re-trial on remand. No ground existed for vacating the amendable Order, nor for granting a new trial. The effect of the majority view tortures the concept of finality of judgment.