Beckham v. Travelers Ins. Co.

• Citation: 424 Pa. 107,225 A.2d 532
• Parties: Elizabeth BECKHAM, Appellant, v. The TRAVELERS INSURANCE COMPANY.
• Decision Date: 04 January 1967
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania

Page 532

225 A.2d 532

424 Pa. 107

Elizabeth BECKHAM, Appellant, v. The TRAVELERS INSURANCE COMPANY.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Jan. 4, 1967.

[424 Pa. 109] Charles Polis, Philadelphia, for appellant.

Richard J. Van Roden, Philadelphia, for appellee.

Before BELL, C.J., and MUSMANNO, JONES, COHEN, EAGEN, O'BRIEN and ROBERTS, JJ.

OPINION OF THE COURT

ROBERTS, Justice.

Andrew Beckham, an employee of Humble Oil & Refining Company, named his mother, Elizabeth, beneficiary under a group life insurance policy issued by The Travelers Insurance Company on the life of Humble's employees. The policy provided for death benefits of $4,000 and also contained a double indemnity provision operative in the event that 'bodily injury not hereinafter excepted effected directly and independently of all other causes through accidental means shall be sustained by a Participant while insured under this Part and shall result (in death).' Andrew died on March 21, 1963, as a result of a self-administered overdose of Narcotics. Travelers paid Mrs. Beckham the $4,000 due as death benefits but denied liability under the double indemnity provision on the ground that Andrew's death, while admittedly not suicide, did not result from accidental means.

Mrs. Beckham instituted an action in the County Court of Philadelphia for the The question posed on this appeal then is whether we shall continue to adhere to the distinction embodied in our case law with respect to insurance policies providing death benefits if the insured dies 'through accidental means.' We have in the past subscribed to the doctrine that recovery should be denied if the insured's death, although unintentional, resulted from an intentional act of the deceased, but that recovery should be permitted when the proximate cause of death was itself the result of an unforeseen or unexpected event. E.g. Frame v. Prudential Ins. Co., 358 Pa. 103, 56 A.2d 76 (1948); O'Neill v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 345 Pa. 232, 26 A.2d 898, 142 A.L.R. 735 (1942); Arnstein v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 329 Pa. 158, 196 A. 491 (1938); Hesse v. Travelers Ins. Co., 299 Pa. 125, 149 A. 96 (1930); Pollock v. United States Mut. Acc. Ass'n, 102 Pa. 230 (1883); Zuliskey v. Prudential Ins. Co., 159 Pa.Super. 363, 48 A.2d 141 (1946); Semancik v. Continental Cas Co., 56 Pa.Super. 392 (1914).

additional $4,000 where she received a favorable verdict; Travelers' motions for [424 Pa. 110] judgment n.o.v. or a new trial were dismissed. On appeal to the Superior Court, the trial court was reversed and judgment entered for Travelers. Beckham v. Travelers Ins. Co., 206 Pa.Super. 488, 214 A.2d 299 (1965) (Wright, J., dissenting); see 70 Dick.L.Rev. 446 (1966). In so ruling, however, that court noted: 'Where this a case of first impression in Pennsylvania, we might be inclined to follow the apparent trend of the recent decisions in other jurisdictions (and hold for the plaintiff) but we are bound by the decisions of our Supreme Court.' Id. at 497, 214 A.2d at 303. Thereafter we granted Mrs. Beckham's petition for allocatur.

The purported distinction between accidental means and accidental results stems from its articulation in United States Mut. Acc. Ass'n v. Barry, 131 U.S. 100, 9 S.Ct. 755, 3 L.Ed. 60 (1889), where, in affirming the correctness of the trial judge's charge, the Supreme Court of the United States stated:

'The court properly instructed * * * that the question was whether there was anything accidental, unforeseen, involuntary, unexpected, in the act of jumping, from the time the deceased left the platform until he alighted on the ground; that the term 'accidental' was used in the policy in its ordinary, popular sense, as meaning 'happening by chance, unexpectedly taking place, nor according to the usual course of things, or not as expected;' that if a result is such as follows from ordinary means, voluntarily employed, in a not unusual or unexpected way, it cannot be called a result effected by accidental means; but that if, in the act which precedes the injury, something unforesen, unexpected, unusual, occurs which produces the injury, then the injury has resulted through accidental means.'

9 S.Ct. at 762. Almost half a century later, the Barry distinction was re affirmed in Landress v. Phoenix Mut. Life Ins. Co., 291 U.S. 491, 54 S.Ct. 461, 78 L.Ed. 934 (1934).

In a now famous dissent Mr. Justice Cardozo, predicted: 'The attempted distinction between accidental results and accidental means will plunge this branch of the law into a Serbonian Bog. 'Probably it is true to say that in the strictest sense and dealing with the region of physical nature there is no such thing as an accident.' * * * On the other hand, the average man is convinced that there is, and so certainly is the man who takes out a policy of accident insurance. It is his reading of the policy that is to be accepted as our guide, with the help of the established rule that ambiguities and uncertainties are to be resolved against the company. * * * The proposed distinction will not survive the application of that test.' Landress v. Phoenix Mut. Life Ins. Co., 291 U.S. 491, 499, 54 S.Ct. 461, 463--464, 78 L.Ed. 934 (1934) (dissenting opinion) (Citations omitted.)

Indeed the tenuous distinction between accidental means and results is well illustrated by the facts of Barry and Landress themselves. In Barry the insured jumped from a platform to the ground about five feet below, where the manner of his landing caused internal hemorrhaging from which he died several days later. The jury, finding that the insured had not intended to land in the precise manner in which he did, returned a verdict in favor of his beneficiary, which was affirmed by the appellate courts. In Landress, on the other hand, the insured's beneficiary was nonsuited because her complaint, which alleged that the insured died of sunstroke while playing golf, could not as a matter of law sustain a finding that death resulted through accidental means.

The New Jersey Supreme Court recently reaffirmed in Barry-Landress distinction. In so doing, it attempted to reconcile the multitude of opinions which have been written throughout the United States on this problem. Linden Motor Freight Co., Inc. v. Travelers Ins. Co., 40 N.J. 511, 193 A.2d 217 (963). After a fairly exhaustive study, the Court concluded:

'the decisions may be reconciled perhaps only on the basis that the actual rationale in each case is, in the final analysis, the particular court's conception of a fair and reasonable result on the specific facts, even though that thought may not be so candidly expressed in the language of the opinion, which ordinarily instead speaks of either the Barry or Landress dissent approach. And, there is, of course, plenty of room for difference of opinion with respect to the result in many cases or in a class of cases, as shown by differing conclusions among the states in analogous factual situations.'

193 A.2d at 229. In our view this attempted reconciliation, especially since we are dealing with an insurance contract, is far from satisfactory. ¹

In light of the New Jersey experience we do not believe that a detailed review of the cases in sister jurisdictions will materially aid us. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that the force of Mr. Justice Cardozo's reasoning in Landress has spearheaded a trend away from the accidental means-result distinction. See Annot., 166 A.L.R. 469 (1947); 29A Am.Jur., Insurance § 1166 (1960). One authority even categorically states that a majority of jurisdictions no longer maintain the distinction. ² 2 Richards, Insurance § 126 (5th ed. 1952). However, as frequently happens when prior decisions are cast aside in favor of a more persuasive analysis, the accidental means-result dichotomy has not always been decently buried. See. e.g., Cox v. Prudential Ins. Co., 172 Cal.App.2d 629, 343 P.2d 99 (1959); Union Central Life Ins. Co. v. Cofer, 103 Ga.App. 355, 119 S.E.2d 281 (1961); Haynes v. American Cas. Co., 228 Md. 394, 179 A.2d 900 (1962); New England Gas & Electric Ass'n v. Ocean Acc. & Guarantee Corp., 300 mass. 640, 651--654, 116 N.E.2d 671, 679--680 (1953); Mills v. State v. Life & Health Ins. Co., 261 N.C. 546, 135 S.E.2d 586 (1964). Instead it has been permitted to remain as a trap for the unwary.

Our own cases have also confirmed Cardozo's prediction about plunging this branch of the law into a Serbonian bog. For example, utilizing the means-result distinction our Court has denied recovery where death was caused by the insured's hypersusceptibility to a particular anesthetic, which had been properly administered to him during the course of an operation. Even in 1930 this was an extremely rare event, occurring only once in every hundred thousand administrations. Hesse v. Travelers Ins. Co., 299 Pa. 125, 128, 149 A. 96, 97 (1930). However, in Urian v. Equitable Life Assur. Soc'y, 310 Pa. 342, 165 A. 388 (1933), the insured was killed by carbon monoxide gas while working on his car in his garage. This Court permitted recovery on the theory that his inhalation of the gas was unconscious and unintentional. ³

The insurance company admits that there was no evidence of suicidal intent in the instant case. Since the jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff, our case law could support a conclusion that the Superior Court erred when it held as a mater of law that Andrew Beckham did not die by 'accidental means.' Thus in Arnstein v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 329 Pa. 158, 196 A. 491 (1938), the insured, under instructions to expose his foot to a heat lamp for five or six minutes, fell asleep on one occasion. As a result of this overexposure, the rays of the lamp caused a bilster which became infected and eventually caused his death. This Court permitted recovery on the theory that once the insured fell asleep the exposure of his foot to the rays was unintentional. In Horan v. Prudential Ins. Co., 104 Pa.Super....