Court Opinion

ID: 9573022
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:46:44.18715+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:29:46.033869
License: Public Domain

WILLIS, Judge
(Concurring specially).
I concur in the result reached by the majority because I believe that it reflects the current state of no-fault law in Minnesota, and we are an error-correcting court only. I write separately to point out that, in my judgment, this case is a good example of how much the concepts of “accident” and “injury arising out of the use of a motor vehicle” have been expanded beyond what I think the legislature had in mind when it adopted the no-fault act in 1974.
Respondent Dougherty’s frostbite injuries resulted from the following: Dougherty spent the evening of December 16, 2000, drinking at two bars. • She left the second bar at approximately 1:15 a.m. on December 17, and, although she was intoxicated, she began to drive the 10 blocks from the bar to her apartment complex. When she was a little more than 300 feet from the door to her apartment, she ran her car into a snowdrift and got stuck. She left her car and began walking toward her apartment, and, unable to stand on the icy parking lot of her apartment complex, she crawled across the parking lot and wound up behind a garage, where she lay down and may have “dozed off,” or passed out, for a time. Approximately 30 minutes after she left her car, she reached the door to her apartment, where she awakened her daughter.
As the majority opinion obliquely suggests, if Dougherty had perhaps been a little less intoxicated and had made it into the parking lot of her apartment complex and parked her car, and then had fallen, crawled, passed out, and suffered frostbite, precedent would dictate that her injuries then would not arise out of the “use of a motor vehicle.” But the fact that Dough-erty did not reach her destination before abandoning her car produces a different result.
I find it difficult to believe that the legislature contemplated the mandatory payment of benefits on facts such as these when it passed the no-fault act 30 years ago to provide benefits “to victims of automobile accidents without regard to whose fault caused the accident.” Minn.Stat. § 65B.42(1) (2002).