Court Opinion

ID: 9535809
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 06:44:35.547637+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:20.693940
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE SIMON, specially concurring: I am troubled by the majority’s lack of attention to what I consider the basic issue in this case: whether dependents of a suicide victim must, in order to collect worker’s compensation, show more than that the suicide would not have occurred but for an accident arising out of and in the course of his employment. I believe that Harper v. Industrial Com. (1962), 24 Ill. 2d 103, and County of Cook v. Industrial Com. (1981), 87 Ill. 2d 204, require more. They require the claimant to have lost his ability to rationally choose between life and death. I do not believe that a person injured on the job should be permitted to rationally weigh the costs and benefits of a life of pain over death, choose death, and expect his dependents to be compensated for this. Bare causality is not enough under such circumstances. A man murdered by a criminal on the street on the way to visit his doctor is not covered by worker’s compensation just because he would not have been going there if it had not been for a work-related injury. A man who is murdered by his wife because she does not like his constant complaining over the pain he is suffering as a result of a work-related injury would not be covered. Even less would one expect a worker to be who, with his wits about him, takes his own life. He made the choice knowing the consequences. He is responsible for his own conduct. Both Harper and County of Cook go to great lengths to describe the emotional disorientation suffered by their respective decedents. In Harper, a psychiatrist testified that the decedent’s back injury caused a definite psychiatric illness with a probable diagnosis of severe chronic depression which later led to a lack of confidence in ability to perform in life situations. In County of Cook, the decedent’s pain prevented her from eating and sleeping. She cried often. She told her psychiatrist that she was angry with her husband, employer, and doctors because they did not believe she was in pain. He diagnosed her condition as severe chronic depression. Professor Larson divides the States into two categories with regard to the compensability of suicide. Both sets of States, however, use a rule that requires the decedent’s suicide to be the result of some mental disturbance. He stated, “Suicide under the majority rule [under which he includes Illinois based upon Harper v. Industrial Commission] is compensable if the injury produces mental derangement and the mental derangement produces suicide. The minority rule is that suicide is not compensable unless [it is a] direct result of a work-connected injury [and] insanity of such severity as to cause the victim to take his own life through an uncontrollable impulse or in a delirium of frenzy without conscious volition to produce death.” (1A Larson, The Law of Workmen’s Compensation sec. 36.00 (1979).) he goes on to say that under the majority rule there remains some room for uncertainty on precisely how deranged the decedent’s mind must be. (See Soileau v. Travelers Insurance Co. (La. App. 1967), 198 So. 2d 543 (“despondency” is not sufficient); Franzoni v. Loew’s Theatre & Realty Corp. (1964), 22 App. Div. 2d 741, 253 N.Y.S.2d 505 (depression is not enough).) But the possibility of recovery without any lapse in rationality has apparently never been acknowledged by any court. While I acknowledge that it is not always necessary to have expert testimony to establish a breakdown in a decedent’s capacity for rational thought, some evidence of mental impairment is necessary. I am confident that the Industrial Commission was aware of this requirement and based its conclusion on a finding in this case that there was mental impairment which resulted from the injury. Although the evidence on this point is not overwhelming, it is still sufficient so that such a finding would not be against the manifest weight of the evidence. I therefore concur in the result which the court has reached.