Court Opinion

ID: 9794810
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 03:12:10.938478+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:20:41.856867
License: Public Domain

SADLER and McGLIEE, Justices (dissenting) . We can not bring ourselves to agree with the prevailing opinion in this case. If authority exists to do what the trial court here proposes to do, it must be found in the Workmen’s Compensation Act. We challenge the claimant-appellee to point out in the act any authority so to do. Note this language from the so-called order reopening the case. It reads: “It is, therefore, adjudged and decreed, that the claimant-plaintiff’s claim be and it is hereby reopened to determine the extent, if any, of claimant-plaintiff’s change in condition since the azvard filed herein on October 2, 1952,” etc. (Emphasis supplied) We are thoroughly familiar with the doctrine that an appeal does not lie from an interlocutory order. But this is not that kind of interlocutory order. Indeed, it is not an interlocutory order at all. Reopening this particular judgment years after it was rendered amounted to setting it aside and awarding claimant a trial on the merits after he had stipulated for a lump sum settlement and received the benefits of a judgment rendered thereon. Suppose, for instance, the trial court announced it proposed to reopen the judgment to determine whether the claimant could read or write; or, was a Methodist or a Baptist or a Catholic; or had not paid last month’s rent. Of course, these suppositions are absurd but so far as a right in the trial court to do it be concerned they are of no less potency than what it is proposed here to do. We give it as our considered judgment that the statutory provisions giving the employee the right to reopen an award for the purpose of increasing it, or the employer the right to do likewise for purpose of decreasing or terminating same, have no application to lump sum settlements that have been approved by the court. We do not mean to say such a settlement procured through fraud or overreaching may not be set aside and held for naught. What we do say is that a lump sum settlement, free from fraud or its equivalent, may not be reopened and the very conditions set at rest by the settlement relitigated in a new trial had on the merits of the claim. In our view and within the doctrine of State ex rel. Del Curto v. District Court (Burguete), 51 N.M. 297, 183 P.2d 607, we might have stopped the reopening of the judgment in this case by prohibition, either upon jurisdictional grounds, or in the exercise of our superintending control, whichever was the true ground of awarding the writ in that case. The writer of this dissent with what he then thought was. good reason contended in a dissent in the Del Curto case, as does claimant (appellee) here, that the order there stayed was interlocutory and should have been reviewed on appeal, as in State ex rel. St. Louis, Rocky Mt. & Pacific Co. v. District Court, 38 N.M. 451, 34 P.2d 1098. His arguments-were of no avail, however, and the writ of prohibition was made permanent, as no doubt upon a proper application, it would have been in this case against the order reviewed, had timely application been made. Indeed, this would have been an apt case in which to employ prohibition for not only is the court about to enforce an order it lacked jurisdiction in the particular case to make but at the same time to reopen for a hearing on the merits a cause of action upon which he could not in any event recover because of an injury occurring before effective date of the statute of which he seeks to avail himself. L.1951, c. 205, § 3. A perfect case for prohibition. But the majority here denominating the order interlocutory, think it unappealable. We may say in passing that if the purpose for which this judgment admittedly is reopened, be upheld, viz., to re-try it on the merits after a lump sum settlement four years old, such settlements will go out the ■window. And why not? If a claimant suffering from a known injury, where liability is questioned, be willing to settle it for an agreed sum, expressed in a writing free from fraud, he is presumed to know and is charged with knowing, if he does not, that his injuries may prove more extensive and lasting than he thinks. He will be conclusively presumed to have taken that possibility into consideration when he signed the agreement. And, where the settlement contains language broad enough to cover unknown and latent injuries, as in this case, how much stronger should that presumption be, as evidencing his intent, as to injuries of which he was then ignorant and which were wholly unknown to him? The question provides an answer in the asking. This judgment was, in effect, set aside contrary to the law and our earlier decisions. The trial court was tinkering with the judgment in a way and for a purpose proscribed by law. To say we can not stop it is to confess our helplessness in the face of an obvious and screaming injustice, in excess of the trial court’s jurisdiction in the case before it. The appeal was properly allowed from the order reviewed treated as, in effect, setting aside the court’s approved lump sum settlement and, hence, as an order entered subsequent to final judgment affecting a substantial right. Supreme Court Rule 5(2). See Jordan v. Jordan, 1923, 29 N.M. 95, 218 P. 1035; Singleton v. Sanabrea, 1930, 35 N.M. 205, 292 P. 6; Kerr v. Southwest Fluorite Co., 1930, 35 N.M. 232, 294 P. 324; Gutierrez v. Brady, 1941, 45 N.M. 209, 113 P.2d 585; Hudson v. Herschbach, 1942, 46 N.M. 330, 128 P.2d 1044; Dunham v. Stitzberg, 1948, 53 N.M. 81, 201 P.2d 1000; Hoover v. City of Albuquerque, 1952, 56 N.M. 525, 245 P.2d 1038; McCoy v. Gooch, Milling & Elev. Co., 156 Neb. 95, 54 N.W.2d 373. It follows from what has been said that we thoroughly disagree with the prevailing opinion. Accordingly, We dissent.