Court Opinion

ID: 9454287
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:42:08.557913+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:34:03.417322
License: Public Domain

PRETTYMAN, Senior Circuit Judge,
with whom BURGER and TAMM, Circuit Judges,
concur, dissenting:
I agree with Judge Tamm’s opinion, infra, but, since I was the author of the majority opinion of the division, I feel constrained to file the following:
The Deputy Commissioner denied this claim. His conclusion must be sustained if it is supported by substantial evidence, unless irrational or forbidden by law. As I understand it, nobody says the Commissioner was irrational. The court suggests that his conclusion was not supported by substantial evidence and therefore was forbidden by law. So from two approaches the problem is whether the denial was supported by substantial evidence. And that involves some abstract rationalizing.
The statute is that these claims must be 'allowed unless substantial evidence to the contrary appears. Did substantial evidence to the contrary appear in the case at bar? No witness stated directly and affirmatively that Wheatley’s heart attack arose out of or was causally connected with his employment; in other words, there was no specific direct evidence in support. And no witness stated that in his expert opinion it was thus causally connected. No documentary evidence was to that effect. On the other hand there was ample showing of what was not the situation. There was no heavy work, no strain, no excitement, no outward appearance of inward disturbance, no unusual physical activity, no emotional distress, no discernible warning, no anticipatory indication. The victim had a severe arteriosclerosis. Medi*317cal evidence was that for people with this affliction death may be triggered by a shock or strain (called a precipitating event), or it may devolve from progress of the disease alone with no outside factor. The testimony did not fix which was the case here. The doctors went only so far as to say that the back-alley incident might have been a precipitating event. The Deputy Commissioner did not find the “might have been” persuasive but deemed the accumulation of negatives to constitute substantial negative evidence and, on summation, found it not offset by any positive evidentiary item. It seems to me that an accumulation of negatives can constitute a negative. Positive proof that a person has no symptom of a certain disease seems to me to be substantial evidence that he does not have that disease; it may not be proof positive, but it is substantial evidence. Thus in the case at bar the affirmative evidence that Wheatley that day had no experience known or generally thought to precipitate a heart failure in an arteriosclerotic patient, and exhibited none of the symptoms of such a precipitating event, is substantial evidence that he experienced no such incident. We need not find that he had no such experience. We need find only that there was substantial evidence he did not.1 When we find the Deputy Commissioner’s conclusion bottomed upon such a record, our function is at an end.
My brethren in the majority say the law in this jurisdiction contemplates awards so long as the death or injury results from activity in the course of employment. The statute does not so say. It says “arising out of and” in the course of. I think this is the first time we have carried the non-employment activity concept into the heart disease area. In doing so we wipe out a statutory phrase.
I would affirm the Deputy Commissioner.

. Del Vecchio v. Bowers, 296 U.S. 280, 56 S.Ct. 190, 80 L.Ed. 229 (1935); Norton v. Warner Co., 321 U.S. 565, 568, 64 S.Ct. 747, 88 L.Ed. 931 (1944).