Court Opinion

ID: 9651070
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:04:54.145723+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:29.642455
License: Public Domain

Justice SAYLOR
dissenting.
The operative language of the Heart and Lung statute proceeds as follows:
Any member of the State Police Force ... who is injured in the performance of his duties ... and by reason thereof is temporarily incapacitated from performing his duties, shall be paid by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ... his full rate of salary ... until the disability arising therefrom has ceased.
53 P.S. § 637(a) (emphasis added). Significantly, the statute expressly designates the responsibilities of the injured trooper *457(“his duties”) as its litmus. Therefore, if a trooper is temporarily incapacitated from performing his assigned responsibilities, he is entitled to Heart and Lung benefits; if he is permanently unable to perform such duties, he is not.
The concept of a particular trooper’s duties need not necessarily be limited exclusively to the particular function served as of the occurrence of his injury. Certainly, the trooper’s broader day-to-day responsibilities should be considered relevant in the assessment, and perhaps an even wider range of employment obligations may be considered in the case of troopers who are shown to have been subject to rotating duty assignments. Thus, although the time-of-injury assignment may not function as a limitation on the determination of the scope of a trooper’s duties, it is potent evidence of elements that are included among those responsibilities. Indeed, absent some extraordinary circumstance, it may be regarded as substantial evidence of functions the trooper must again be capable of performing to be eligible for temporary Heart and Lung benefits.1
The Heart and Lung Act does not speak directly to a recurrence-of-injury situation (such as is presented here) as it affects the ascertainment of a trooper’s duties. In such paradigm, consistent with the above, I would not wholly discount that evidence of the Trooper’s responsibilities at the time of recurrence may bear some significance to the determi*458nation of his duties. But where the factfinder has attributed greater weight to time-of-injury responsibilities and requirements for general fitness in the occupation in delineating the relevant duties, I do not believe that its judgment should be disturbed, unless it can be said that these latter factors fall short of substantial evidence. In my view, for an appellate court to rest its contrary determination on the identification of limited responsibilities performed by some subset of troopers in general, or a light-duty assignment made available to the trooper after his injury, is in tension with the Heart and Lung Act as stated, see generally supra & note 1, its underlying policy,2 and restraints on judicial review of administrative adjudications, including respect afforded to factual findings made by an agency that are supported by substantial evidence. See 2 Pa.C.S. § 704. Further, such approaches would seem to facilitate potentially perverse incentives on the part of the State Police in the calculus that it must perform in its relationship with an injured trooper, for example, in militating toward possible curtailment of compassionate duty assignments.
*459To encapsulate the primary difference between the majority’s analytical approach and mine, the majority views the primary question presented as one of law amenable to de novo review by this Court, see Majority Opinion, op. at 371; whereas, I believe that the dispositive determination involves delineation of the individual trooper’s assigned duties, which I regard as inherently a factual assessment.3 Further, to the extent that this Court has designated as controlling the determination whether a trooper can “perform the duties of a position that is regularly assigned to state policemen even though the job be entirely sedentary,” Palmeri v. Commonwealth, Pennsylvania State Police, 508 Pa. 544, 552-53, 499 A.2d 278, 282 (1985), I would disavow this approach, as I believe that it dilutes the requirements of the Heart and Lung Act, promotes circumvention of the applicable standard of review, and has yielded inconsistent decisions in the appellate arena.
In the present case, Trooper Durante suffered an injury to his back in 1985 and has been unable to return to his time-of-injury duties as a uniformed patrol trooper since 1988.4 He was placed in a restricted-duty post to accommodate his incapacity, and was adjudged by the State Police Commissioner (as factfinder) to perform, in his light-duty position, “few, if any, functions and duties of a Trooper.” 5 Because of numer*460ous surgical procedures and courses of physical therapy attributable to recurrences of his back injury, Trooper Durante’s treating physician concluded that, even prior to the recurrence, he was permanently, partially disabled and thus could nonreturn to unrestricted duty.
In such circumstances, I believe that the State Police Commissioner’s findings concerning the scope of' Trooper Durante’s assigned duties are supported by substantial evidence, and the Commissioner’s conclusion, based upon such evidence, that Trooper Durante was permanently disabled from performance of his duties for purposes of the Heart and Lung Act is in accordance with law. I would therefore reinstate the administrative determination of benefits ineligibility.
Justice NIGRO joins this dissenting opinion.

. The Slate Police Commissioner made an analogous point in commenting on the impact of permanent confinement of a trooper to limited-duty status upon the Heart and Lung assessment:
Limited duty was described as placing certain conditions and restrictions on Troopers because of existing medical conditions. These restrictions, in turn, limit the functions and duties that the Trooper can perform. It is important to note that, by definition, a Trooper is placed on limited duty exactly because he/she cannot perform the duties of a Trooper. This is an important distinction that clarifies the issue of performance of duties.
In re Trooper William J. Durante (Commissioner, Pa. State Police Jan. 26, 1999) (emphasis removed); accord Cunningham v. Commonwealth, Pennsylvania State Police, 510 Pa. 74, 86, 507 A.2d 40, 47 (1986) ("An individual .. . who suffers a forty percent permanent partial disability to his lower back cannot ... perform the duties of a state policeman.”).

. The purpose of the Heart and Lung Act is to provide Commonwealth and municipal employees engaged in police, corrections, or fire-fighting functions with temporary disability compensation for injuries incurred in the course of their sometimes-hazardous duties, with the guarantee of uninterrupted income during such disability constituting both an attraction for service and an incentive for a reasonably speedy return to full active duty. Sea Camaione v. Borough of Latrobe, 523 Pa. 363, 366-67, 567 A.2d 638, 640 (1990). While compensation pursuant to the Heart and Lung Act is similar in certain respects to that provided under the Workers’ Compensation Act, the latter’s purpose is more directly humanitarian, as it provides benefits to injured workers for losses of earning power resulting from either temporary or permanent disability, whereas the former extends benefits only for temporary disability. See generally Iben v. Borough of Monaca, 158 Pa.Super. 46, 49, 43 A.2d 425, 427 (1945) (differentiating the coverage and purposes of the Workers’ Compensation Act with those underlying the Heart and Lung Act). Indeed, the Heart and Lung Act's limitation in this regard has been interpreted as inuring to the interest of the employer as opposed to the employee, see id., and its provisions have been deemed subject to strict construction. See generally Organ v. Pennsylvania State Police, 112 Pa.Cmwlth. 352, 355 n. 5, 535 A.2d 713, 714 n. 5 (1988) (citing 1 Pa.C.S. § 1928(b)(8)).
It is also worth noting that ineligibility under the Heart and Lung Act does not preclude a trooper from receiving workers’ compensation.

. Cf. Jarrett v. ERC Properties, Inc., 211 F.3d 1078, 1081 (8th Cir.2000) ("Dispules regarding the nature of an employee’s duties are questions of fact[.]” (citation omitted)); Stern v. National Life Ins. Co., 2002 WL 31101684, at *2 (N.D.Ill. Sep.20, 2002) (explaining that “[t]he determination of whether or not [an insured is] unable to perform the substantial and material duties of his occupation at the time of his disability is inherently a fact question’’); Walters v. General Accident and Fire Assurance Co., 119 So.2d 550, 556 (La.Ct.App.1960) ("Obviously the question of whether a particular employee is engaged in work of a character different from that which he pursued when injured or is undertaking the same employment but only partially fulfilling the duties thereof, is a question of fact to be adjudicated and determined in the light of all the circumstances surrounding each individual case.”).

. Appellee has been diagnosed as suffering from a degenerative spinal disc condition, resulting, inter alia, in a neurological impairment affecting his ability to use his right arm.

. The State Police Commissioner described Trooper Durante's restricted duties to entail, inter alia, “picking up supplies, taking vehicles back *460and forth for service, automotive maintenance officer, escorting cleaning people around the barracks, and conducting inventory of equipment and supplies.”