Duvall v. Charles Connell Roofing

• Decision Date: 26 April 1988
• Citation: 564 A.2d 1132
• Parties: William R. DUVALL, Jr., Employee Below, Appellant, v. CHARLES CONNELL ROOFING, Employer Below, Appellee. . Submitted:
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Delaware

Page 1132

564 A.2d 1132

William R. DUVALL, Jr., Employee Below, Appellant, v. CHARLES CONNELL ROOFING, Employer Below, Appellee.

Supreme Court of Delaware.

Submitted: April 26, 1988.

Decided: Sept. 12, 1989.

Sidney Balick of Sidney Balick & Associates, Wilmington, for appellant.

Timothy A. Casey of Prickett, Jones, Elliott, Kristol & Schnee, Wilmington, for appellee.

Before CHRISTIE, C.J., HORSEY, MOORE, WALSH and HOLLAND, JJ., constituting the Court en Banc.

MOORE, Justice.

For over twenty-five years decisions of this Court have engrafted the "unusual exertion" rule upon our Workmen's Compensation Law. Thus, an employee with a "pre-existing physical weakness", whose employment aggravates that condition, is denied compensation unless it can be shown that the worker was engaged in some form of unusual exertion at the time of a job related injury. ¹ Today we reexamine this rule of law and abandon it.

William Duvall appeals a decision of the Superior Court affirming the Industrial Accident Board's denial of workmen's compensation benefits allegedly due him because of a back injury sustained while performing his routine duties for Charles C. Connell Roofing. The Board denied Duvall benefits based upon proof that he had an unknown pre-existing back condition at the time of injury, and upon his subsequent inability to prove unusual exertion as required by General Motors Corp. v. Veasey, Del.Supr., 371 A.2d 1074 (1977). We believe that abandoning the unusual exertion rule and its patent inequities is consistent with the statutory principle that compensation be paid "for personal injury or death by accident arising out of and in the course of employment." 19 Del.C. § 2304 (1985). In the absence of contrary legislation, therefore, we adopt the "usual exertion" rule. Under this principle, an injury is compensable if the ordinary stress and strain of employment is a substantial cause of the injury. Accordingly, we reverse.

I.

William Duvall is 35 years old, and was a roofer for most of his adult life. On May 16, 1985, while unloading an eighty pound bundle of roof shingles, Duvall experienced pain in his back. He consulted an orthopedic surgeon, who diagnosed Duvall's condition as an acute lumbosacral sprain combined with spondylolisthesis, a congenital weakness in the bones of the back which has no symptoms until triggered by stress on the back.

Duvall filed a petition with the Industrial Accident Board to determine compensation due. After a hearing the Board denied Duvall's petition. Specifically, the Board found that Duvall had a pre-existing back condition and that the injury was not the result of "unusual exertion" as required by Veasey.

Duvall appealed to the Superior Court, which affirmed the Board's decision. The court determined that substantial evidence existed in the record to support the Board's findings of "pre-existing condition" and a lack of "unusual exertion."

Duvall contends that substantial evidence did not exist to support these findings. Alternatively, he urges us to abandon the unusual exertion test of Veasey. While we agree with the Superior Court's findings of a pre-existing condition and a lack of unusual exertion, we nevertheless reverse as a matter of law by abandoning the unusual exertion standard.

II.

It is fundamental that the two primary purposes of the Delaware Workmen's Compensation Law, 19 Del.C. Ch. 23 (1985), are to assure prompt compensation of injured employees without regard to fault and to obviate the need for litigation. Champlain Cable Corp. v. Employers Mut. Liab. Ins. Co., Del.Supr., 479 A.2d 835, 840 (1984). Thus, 19 Del.C. § 2304 (1985) provides:

Every employer and employee, adult and minor, except as expressly excluded in this chapter, shall be bound by this chapter respectively to pay and to accept compensation for personal injury or death by accident arising out of and in the course of employment, regardless of the question of negligence and to the exclusion of all other rights and remedies.

Injury for which compensation must be paid and accepted is defined by 19 Del.C. § 2301(12) (1985) as follows:

'Injury' and 'personal injury' mean violence to the physical structure of the body, such disease or infection as naturally results directly therefrom when reasonably treated and compensable occupational diseases and compensable ionizing radiation injuries arising out of and in the course of employment.

While the law is not a general health insurance statute, Air Mod Corp. v. Newton, 59 Del. 148, 215 A.2d 434, 442 (1965), it should be interpreted liberally to fulfill its intended compensation goal under § 2304. The unusual exertion rule, created solely by judicial decisions, represents a peculiar but marked limitation upon that endeavor.

This stems from the Court's narrow interpretation of the term "accident" under 19 Del.C. § 2304. Thus, in Faline v. Guido and Francis DeAscanis & Sons, 56 Del. 202, 192 A.2d 921 (1963), compensation was denied to a heart attack victim because his injury was due in part to a pre-existing coronary disease. The Court held that because the injury occurred while the worker performed his ordinary routine, notwithstanding its considerable emotional and physical stress, his heart attack was only an aggravation of a known pre-existing idiopathic disease, and not an unexpected "injury by accident". Id. 192 A.2d at 924. Compensation was due only if the worker exerted himself beyond the level normally required by the "ordinary routine of his job." Id.

Originally, this usual-unusual exertion distinction was limited to infarction-type heart cases, Reynolds v. Continental Can Co., Del.Supr., 240 A.2d 135, 136 (1968) (overruled by Mooney v. Benson Management Co., 466 A.2d 1209 (1983), but thereafter was expanded to include back injuries, Milowicki v. Post and Paddock, Inc., Del.Supr., 260 A.2d 430, 431 (1969). Finally, in Veasey, 371 A.2d at 1075, the unusual exertion rule was adopted for all cases involving a job related aggravation of a pre-existing condition. Because the unusual exertion rule is both legally unsound and inequitable, we now abandon it. To the extent that Faline and Veasey are inconsistent with this holding, we expressly overrule them and their progeny.

III.

In abandoning the unusual exertion rule Delaware joins a substantial majority of states which have done so. ² There are two primary reasons for this shift in the law, one theoretical, the other practical.

The fallacy of the unusual exertion rule is its presumption that only an unusual exertion can produce an accidental result. See 1B A. Larson, Larson's Workmen's Compensation Law § 38.62 (1987). This simply is not true. Under 1 Del.C. § 303 (1985) we are required to construe statutory provisions "according to the common and approved usage of the English language." Our Workmen's Compensation Law does not define the term "accident" as used in 19 Del.C. § 2304. Nor is it generally considered to be a technical word with a peculiar and appropriate meaning. Webster's defines "accident" as: "An event that takes place without one's foresight or expectation; an undesigned, sudden, and unexpected event." Webster's New International Dictionary, (2d Ed.1950). When there is an unusual exertion followed by an injury, the cause of the harm is no more unexpected than if the injury was produced by some form of usual exertion. The resulting injury is unexpected regardless of the endeavor, and there is no rational basis for distinguishing between the two. See generally 1B A. Larson, supra, at § 38.62.

Likewise, Delaware's adoption of the unusual exertion test for a pre-existing condition is based on the erroneous notion that an injury is less "accidental" if partially caused by such condition. Although a worker with a pre-existing condition may be more prone to injuries relating to that state, a pre-existing condition alone will not produce an injury. Some other contributing factor must be present. When that factor is the everyday stress and strain of a worker's job, he or she should not be denied compensation on a theory which finds no support in the statutory enactments of the General Assembly. There is a causal connection between the unexpected injury and the work effort which produced it. That causal connection is as much a form of accident as any other to be encountered in a workplace, and should not be a basis for the denial of compensation. This interpretation is entirely consistent with the earlier views of this Court in General Motors Corp. v. McNemar, Del.Supr., 202 A.2d 803, 807 (1964), in which Chief Justice Terry stated:

[T]he fact that a claimant suffers from a pre-existing physical defect will not preclude the award of compensation if the conditions of employment cause a sudden and violent acceleration and deterioration of the defect....

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... A sudden rupture of an aneurysm may properly be considered a personal injury within the purview of 19 Del.C. Sec. 2301.... Such injuries, when caused by the physical strain or emotional stress attendant upon the usual duties of employment, are compensable under the Workmen's Compensation Law.

Even if we ignore this fundamental weakness of the unusual exertion rule, we are nevertheless faced with the impracticability of its application. First, as Larson observes, what is "usual" to an employee is not easy to identify. 1B A. Larson, supra, at § 38.63. Most workers are assigned a variety of tasks requiring a variety of skills and levels of exertion. Second, application of the unusual exertion rule produces arbitrary, inequitable and often ridiculous results. For example, a worker with a pre-existing condition, who is injured while routinely lifting a heavy object as a part of his "usual" employment, would not recover. Yet, a worker with the same condition, whose employment requires no lifting, could recover for the "unusual" lifting of even a very light object. Certainly, in both cases the lifting substantially...