Impacts of Modern Life Support Techniques on Wrongful Death Actions Brought After Final Personal Injury Judgments
| Publication year | 1992 |
| Citation | Vol. 16 No. 02 |
I. Introduction
When an individual suffers personal injuries that ultimately result in death, two separate legal actions are available. Initially, the victim may seek compensation for his or her personal injuries.(fn1) Later, if the victim dies because of those injuries, the decedent's survivors may institute a wrongful death action.(fn2) Until recently, while both of these actions were theoretically possible, only the wrongful death action was actually taken to final judgment. Double litigation seldom occurred because the victim rarely survived long enough to obtain a final personal injury judgment. Therefore, neither claim preclusion nor issue preclusion barred the wrongful death beneficiaries' cause of action,(fn3) and no equitable concerns over double recovery arose.
Recent advances in medical care, however, have "exacerbated a deficiency in the law."(fn4) Because life support technologies can substantially prolong survival, it is increasingly possible for a personal injury action to reach final judgment before death occurs.(fn5) If the victim dies as a result of life support withdrawal, complex legal and ethical dilemmas arise in the survivors' wrongful death action because two judgments are rendered and, therefore, two awards may accrue to survivors.
The drafters of the earliest wrongful death acts could not foresee this double litigation scenario, or the bearing that medical developments would have upon it, when the first statutes were created in the mid-nineteenth century.(fn6) These acts, now incorporated in the statutes of all states, sought to create recovery for a decedent's survivors to compensate them for the very real injuries that they might sustain from the loss of a relative.(fn7)
This Comment examines the legal and equitable dilemmas that arise in such circumstances and proposes various solutions. Section II examines both the history of wrongful death actions and modern applications of law. This historical overview reveals that most courts reject the doctrinal bases of wrongful death actions.(fn8) Specifically, when one has recovered on behalf of a decedent for fatal injuries, these courts tend to construe wrongful death statutes in a manner that denies statutory beneficiaries of a cause of action. Such preclusion is driven by the following policy concerns: finality of judgments,(fn9) perceived windfalls to wrongful death beneficiaries,(fn10) and illmotivated decisions made by those beneficiaries to withdraw life support, thereby creating a death upon which to sue.(fn11)
To the extent that problems of finality and overcompensation are real, this Comment asserts that the remedy does not lie in misconstruing wrongful death acts so as to deny beneficiaries all recovery. Rather, the answer lies in fashioning damages rules that avoid overcompensation without precluding recovery altogether. Alternative damages rules can also minimize the risk that beneficiaries will prematurely withdraw life support in order to create a death upon which to sue or to preserve to the decedent's estate the prior personal injury award. To the extent that new damages rules fail to eliminate this risk, additional safeguards can guide surrogate medical decision-making and the use of living wills. Accordingly, these solutions would enable courts to construe wrongful death statutes in a manner consistent with the doctrines that produced them, while preventing excessive recoveries.
Section III sets forth the case of
II. History and Modern Applications of Law
Prior to developments in modern life support techniques, an injured victim would often die before commencing a personal injury action or bringing it to final judgment. Even when such an action was commenced, death would often follow soon enough to permit a wrongful death action brought by the victim's survivors to be joined to the decedent's pending personal injury action.(fn13)
Modern medical developments now permit a victim to survive beyond final litigation,(fn14) notwithstanding the two- to five- year time frames of many personal injury actions.(fn15) These developments pose new dilemmas in the context of personal injury litigation-dilemmas that will likely bear increasingly on the application of wrongful death acts.
To understand what recovery a decedent's survivors might reasonably seek as wrongful death beneficiaries, it is important to evaluate the legal doctrines that produced this cause of action and to view what recovery was historically available to injured victims themselves. Distinguishing between recovery available to victims, as opposed to their survivors, clarifies both historical trends and modern applications of law. Importantly, an historical overview aids in the evaluation of modern courts' fidelity to the doctrinal foundations of wrongful death actions in the context of prior adjudication.
Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, certain restrictive rules applied where a victim died from tortiously-inflicted injuries. First, a victim's right to sue for his or her injuries died with either the tortfeasor or the unfortunate victim.(fn16) This harsh rule has been replaced in virtually all states by acts known generally as "survival statutes," which permit the victim's cause of action to survive his or her death.(fn17)
A second harsh rule that existed prior to the mid-1800s denied survivors and dependents of an independent cause of action, despite the fact that they might have suffered severe financial and emotional loss as a result of the victim's death.(fn18) No independent recovery existed to compensate these "secondary" victims of a defendant's illegal conduct.(fn19) Rather, at common law "the death of a human being could not be complained of as an injury."(fn20) Thus, prior to the creation of survival and wrongful death actions, it was "cheaper for the defendant to kill the plaintiff than to injure him."(fn21)
In England, a remedy for a victim's relatives appeared in 1846 with Lord Campbell's Act,(fn22) the progenitor of wrongful death statutes now adopted in the United States and in Canada. Entitled "[a]n act for compensating the families of persons killed by accidents,"(fn23) this act provided as follows:
Nearly all state wrongful death statutes incorporate the very wording of Lord Campbell's Act or language that provides for essentially the same basis of liability.(fn26) Yet, in applying that language, the majority of courts largely undermine the principles that originally gave rise to wrongful death actions. Those principles addressed the compensation of a victim's surviving relatives for very real injuries sustained by them, independent of those injuries sustained by the decedent.
1. Majority Rule
When a deceased victim has litigated a prior personal injury suit to final judgment, courts in the majority of jurisdictions construe wrongful death acts in a manner that withholds compensation from survivors.(fn27) Despite the fact that wrongful death acts confer on surviving beneficiaries the independent right to recover, under the majority rule, survivors may sue only if the decedent herself could actually have done so at the time of death.(fn28)
The majority rule rests in part on the policy concern for finality of judgments: a cause of action merges into a (personal injury) judgment, and once that judgment is final, no cause of action remains.(fn29) The denial of recovery to surviving beneficiaries turns on judicial construction of the "derivative" language of wrongful death statutes; that is, the extent to which the right to sue in wrongful death derives from the decedent's right to sue for personal...
To continue reading
Request your trial