Court Opinion

ID: 9566951
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:45:14.447559+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:41:54.096406
License: Public Domain

Dben, Judge,
dissenting as to Division 2. If this court was correct in holding with Judge Jenkins in Farrar v. Farrar, 41 Ga. App. 120 (152 SE 278), that nothing in the policy of the law inhibits an action by an adult child against a parent for a personal tort grounded on negligence, I am constrained to insist that the second division of the majority opinion is founded on a false premise. The thrust of the decision is that since a wife cannot sue her husband for personal injury during cover*176ture, children cannot sue their parent for the value of her life after the coverture has been ended by homicide. Yet the coverture only prevents the wife from suing while in life and while married to the husband. Similarly, minority prevents a child from suing its parent for simple negligence while unemancipated. One disability ends upon divorce or death, the other upon reaching the age of 21 or on emancipation. Wright v. Wright, 85 Ga. App. 721 (70 SE2d 152). And there is no “family unity” doctrine in Georgia which would bar the action of even an unemancipated child against .a parent where both parents are in fact dead. Union Bank &c. Co. v. First Nat. Bank &c. Co., 362 F2d 311, supra.
If the children’s right of action were derivative from that of a parent the situation would be different, but the right to sue for the wrongful death of a parent, spouse or child is a new, unrelated, and statutory cause of action. Bloodworth v. Jones, 191 Ga. 193, 194 (11 SE2d 658); Western & A. R. Co. v. Michael, 175 Ga. 1, 13 (165 SE 37); Thompson v. Watson, 186 Ga. 396, 405 (197 SE 774, 117 ASR 484); Nashville &c. R. Co. v. Hubble, 140 Ga. 368 (78 SE 919, LRA 1915E 1132). “Actions for wrongful death are statutory in origin and repose in the person or persons to whom such right is given by the statute solely by reason of the survivor’s relationship to the deceased.” (Emphasis supplied.) Burns v. Brickle, 106 Ga. App. 150 (126 SE2d 633). The relation of the deceased to the defendant is irrelevant, and equally irrelevant is the fact that the deceased, had she lived, could not have brought against the defendant a wholly different cause of action in her own behalf, which, as pointed out in Hubble, supra (p. 372), is “so utterly different in origin, in right of recovery, in evidence admissible, and in beneficiaries.” As was stated in Burns, supra, even the starting point for determining the statute of limitation on suit may well be different. The Supreme Court held in Happy Valley Farms v. Wilson, 192 Ga. 830, 836 (16 SE2d 720) that the right of children to recover for the death of a parent is not limited by the fact that the other parent, a co-plaintiff, was guilty of negligence which was a part of the proximate cause of the fatality, and it followed this ruling in Walden v. Coleman, 217 Ga. 599 *177(124 SE2d 265, 95 ALR2d 579) (and incidentally reversed the Court of Appeals which had held to the contrary) with a decision that a widow might sue and recover for the homicide of her husband from the defendant owner of the vehicle, applying the family car doctrine, although the sole cause of the death was the negligence of the plaintiff’s daughter, driver of the car and one of the beneficiaries of the action under Code § 105-1304. It thus becomes obvious that the mere fact of relationship is not of itself sufficient to deny to any party to the litigation a right which he otherwise has under the law. Each beneficiary has his own right of action which must be determined on the basis of his relationship to the deceased, not on his relationship to some other party or on some other person’s relationship to the deceased. The case of Chastain v. Chastain, 50 Ga. App. 241 (3) (177 SE 828) cited in the majority opinion in actual fact supports this position. Its holding is clearly and simply that a general demurrer must be sustained to the petition of a wife against her husband based on the death of a 5-year-old child because the wife, being under the disability of coverture, could not sue her husband in her own right and, the child being under the disability of minority, she could not sue in its right. The plaintiffs here, however, are not minors, as must be presumed from the fact that none is suing by guardian or next friend. They are under no disability in an action against their father. They have a statutory right to sue whomever the evidence shows to be the party guilty of their mother’s death. If the negligence of one of themselves would not bar recovery, why should the coverture of their mother, which ceased with her death and could not by definition exist concurrently with a right of action in them?
While there are cases supporting both views in other jurisdictions, this seems to me most consonant with the present status of Georgia law. It also appears, as stated in 28 ALR2d 662, Anno, to be the recent and better reasoned trend of courts throughout the country. In any event, the cause of action can be cut off only if the right of action is derivative, and Georgia holds that it is not derivative but is a new statutory substantive right. See also Shiver v. Sessions (Fla.), 80 S.2d 905, which *178points out that the common law immunity of the husband stemmed from the disability of the wife to own property; that the husband’s act did not thereby cease to be unlawful, but only without remedy as to her because of her personal disability, and that the Wrongful Death Act created “an entirely new cause of action, in an entirely new right, for the recovery of damages suffered by them [the plaintiff children,] not the decedent, as a consequence of the invasion of their legal right by the tortfeasor.” “To extend the tortfeasor’s immunity to a new cause of action by the survivors of the deceased wife would apply the immunity rule to a situation never contemplated in its creation and wholly irrelevant to its results.” Deposit Guaranty Bank &c. Co. v. Nelson, 212 Miss. 335 (54 S2d 476). To the extent that the death statute may be termed derivative, “its derivation ... is from the tortious act, and not from the person of the deceased, so that it comes to the parties named in the statute free from personal disabilities arising from the relationship of the injured party and the tortfeasor.” Kaczorowski v. Kalkosinski, 321 Pa. 438 (184 A 663, 104 ALR 1267). Indubitably, I find no reason why the fact that the mother would have been without remedy in her own behaif during her lifetime should deprive these plaintiffs of a separate cause of action which arose only upon her death.