Court Opinion

ID: 9704762
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:45:30.345252+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:05.107619
License: Public Domain

Peek, J.,
dissenting. The majority opinion illustrates the motivation for the gradually increasing demand in this country for reforms of the tort law. As that law has developed by judicial activism, the courts have made of themselves a virtual lottery, continually finding new grounds upon which to base liability in the litigation explosion which is swamping their case loads. All too often this pattern contributes to enormous and unjustified *163verdicts. Understandably confused by the bewildering legalese of instructions in the law given to them from the bench, juries are easily tempted into verdicts based on subjective emotions and sympathy.
In this case, the majority has seized on words which do not even appear in the controlling statute, 14 V.S.A. § 1492(b), that is, “mental anguish and grief,” to create two separate and supposedly unrelated damage amounts: first, those damages expressly allowed by § 1492(b), and secondly, that pure legislative invention of the judicial mind (quoted above), “mental anguish and grief.” If the jury finds both to exist (based on exactly what is a mystery), it must combine and then “add the two amounts to calculate ‘total damages.’”
I am in complete accord with the defendant’s argument that this theory necessarily permits double recovery. I would go even further and say it not only permits double recovery, it creates a virtual certainty of such a result. The majority’s attempt to separate the intent of the statute into two separate elements is judicial legislation at it worst. Nor am I at all impressed by the precedential citations relied upon; there are only two, to begin with; for practical purposes only one, since the second state court decision simply adopts and follows the first. Now the majority of this Court follows in line sheep-like, substituting the unsound reasoning of these precedents for clear and independent thinking. But also there must be precedents though the heavens fall! And indeed, in this case, the heavens fell — right on the defendant.
I will explain briefly my own rationale. How anyone can separate out the “loss of love and the companionship” of a deceased child, from “mental anguish and grief” arising from the same loss (reiterating that the latter phrase is pure judicial, not statutory, legislation) is incomprehensible. The one is as much a part of the other as darkness is a part of the night. Certainly, the majority makes no effort to clarify or distinguish the difference, other than to label one positive and the other negative, a distinction as meaningless and unexplainable as the underlying proposition itself. Accordingly, I concur with the defendant’s position that damages for grief is not a separate item of dam*164ages since it is included in so-called first item and contained within the meaning of the express language of the statute. There is no need or justification for the language added to the statute by the majority opinion.
Reversal is the only fair answer to this appeal since a double recovery already exists in the jury’s verdict. Because of the confusion which must have resulted from the trial court’s attempt to make two out of one, I suspect that the understandable promptings of sympathy very likely played a major role in the verdict.
[GJreat caution should be exercised ... to guard against the element of sympathy playing any part in the result. [This] case seems to me particularly susceptible to such a possibility.
Roberts v. State, 147 Vt. 160, 174, 514 A.2d 694, 702 (1986) (Peck, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). The majority has ignored and violated this Court’s own long standing rule that it is not
a legitimate function of this Court to expand a statute by implication, that is, by reading into it something which is not there, unless it is necessary in order to make it effective. Saund v. Saund, 100 Vt. 387, 393, 138 A. 867, 870 (1927). To do so would usurp the exclusive prerogative of the Legislature; it would constitute judicial legislation, Maurice Callahan & Sons, Inc. v. Armstrong, 125 Vt. 213, 215, 214 A.2d 70, 73 (1965) (citing Murphy Motor Sales, Inc. v. First National Bank, 122 Vt. 121, 124, 165 A.2d 341, 343 (1960)), and violate the border lines drawn by the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers. Vermont Constitution, Chapter II, § 5.
State v. Jacobs, 144 Vt. 70, 75, 472 A.2d 1247, 1250 (1984) (emphasis in the original).
The wrong done the defendant by the majority’s decision not only expands § 1492(b) by implication, and reads into it language which is not there, but even more egregious and unjust, it authorizes, indeed it virtually mandates, double recovery against this and future hapless defendants. I cannot condone *165this consequence by silence. Accordingly, I must dissent. A proper and fair result requires reversal.