Court Opinion

ID: 9580755
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:08:36.125622+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:36:29.986831
License: Public Domain

Judge Phillips
dissenting.
In my opinion G.S. 28A-18-2 as now written authorizes plaintiffs-action and Gay v. Thompson, 266 N.C. 394, 146 S.E. 2d 425 (1966) has no application to this case and the order appealed from should be reversed.
A “person,” according to the common understanding of mankind if the dictionaries they use are any guide, is simply a human being. Nothing in the Wrongful Death Act or its history suggests that the word meant anything else to the General Assembly, but much indicates that it did not. The General Assembly frequently exercises its power to give words and phrases special meaning and if it had intended for the word “person” to have a limited application, it could have easily accomplished that purpose. Since there is no reason for supposing that the General Assembly intended the act to apply to less than all the human beings in this state, I view the restrictive definition coined by a panel of this Court in Cardwell v. Welch, 25 N.C. App. 390, 213 S.E. 2d 382, cert. denied, 287 N.C. 464, 215 S.E. 2d 623 (1975) as a judicial interpolation that should be disavowed, rather than followed. A viable, healthy 12-pound boy at term immediately before birth is certainly a human being and plaintiffs action is authorized in my opinion under both the language and spirit of the act.
Gay v. Thompson arose under G.S. 28-173, 174, our former Wrongful Death Act, and its only possible bearing on this case is that the court’s failure there to recognize that ascertainable damages could result from the wrongful death of viable, healthy children ready to be born was one of the reasons the Legislature *121replaced G.S. 28-174, the damages part of the old act, with what is now subsection (b) of G.S. 28A-18-2. Other reasons for that step were holdings denying recovery for the deaths of unemployed housewives, Lamm v. Lorbacher, 235 N.C. 728, 71 S.E. 2d 49 (1952), elderly persons no longer capable of earning wages, Armentrout v. Hughes, 247 N.C. 631, 101 S.E. 2d 793 (1958), mentally retarded people, Scriven v. McDonald, 264 N.C. 727, 142 S.E. 2d 585 (1965), and infants a few months old whose injuries occurred before they were born, Stetson v. Easterling, 274 N.C. 152, 161 S.E. 2d 531 (1968). In these and other cases recovery was denied upon the ground that no pecuniary injury resulted from the deaths involved, a patently fallacious ground, since some decedents were performing services of great value for their families; the expectancies of healthy children at all steps after becoming viable can be easily established by evidence and public records for more than a hundred years show that nearly all children that survive become wage earners; and it is elementary law that the difficulty of proving damages does not exonerate wrongdoers who create the difficulty. “The most elementary conceptions of justice and public policy require that the wrongdoer shall bear the risk of the uncertainty which his own wrong has created.” Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, 327 U.S. 251, 265, 90 L.Ed. 652, 660, 66 S.Ct. 574, 580, reh. denied, 327 U.S. 817, 90 L.Ed. 1040, 66 S.Ct. 815 (1946). In all events, these and other obstacles to recovery, which had greatly limited the application and scope of our Wrongful Death Act, were removed when the 1969 General Assembly replaced G.S. 174, the damages part of the act, with what is now subsection (b) of G.S. 28A-18-2. In doing so the General Assembly made plain, both through the amendment and the enacting clause, that the new law corrected the deficiencies of the old, that the difficulty of proving damages was no longer a bar to recovery, and that the act applied to all human beings wrongfully killed in the state. The Act’s enacting clause is as follows:
Whereas, human life is inherently valuable; and
WHEREAS, the present statute is so written and construed that damages recoverable from a person who has caused death by a wrongful act are effectually limited to such figure as can be calculated from the expected earnings of the deceased, which is far from an adequate measure of the value of human life; Now, therefore,
*122The General Assembly of North Carolina do enact:
And the enactment eliminated any basis forever dismissing a wrongful death claim on the ground that no damage resulted from the death by authorizing the recovery of nominal damages, as well as damages for lost services, society, assistance and companionship.
In my opinion, the dismissal of this action was without legal basis and I vote to reverse the order appealed from.