Hernandez v. County of Los Angeles

• Decision Date: 22 December 1986
• Citation: 232 Cal.Rptr. 519,42 Cal.3d 1020,728 P.2d 1154
• Court: California Supreme Court
• Parties: , 728 P.2d 1154 Marcello Roberto HERNANDEZ, a Minor, etc., Plaintiff and Appellant, v. COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES, Defendant and Respondent. L.A. 32113.

Page 519

232 Cal.Rptr. 519

42 Cal.3d 1020, 728 P.2d 1154

Marcello Roberto HERNANDEZ, a Minor, etc., Plaintiff and Appellant, v. COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES, Defendant and Respondent.

L.A. 32113.

Supreme Court of California,

In Bank.

Dec. 22, 1986.

Rehearing Denied March 11, 1987.

Girardi, Keese & Crane, John A. Girardi, James B. Kropff and Steven M. Maslauski, Los Angeles, for plaintiff and appellant.

Golman & Von Bolschwing, Sausalito, Bonne, Jones, Bridges, Mueller & O'Keefe, Los Angeles, Horvitz, Levy & Amerian, David M. Axelrad, Barry R. Levy, Ellis J. Horvitz and David S. Ettinger, Encino, for defendant and respondent.

GRODIN, Justice.

Plaintiff Marcello Hernandez, a minor, seeks review of a decision of the Court of Appeal which affirmed a trial court order barring his personal injury action against defendant County of Los Angeles because of the failure of his parent or attorney to file a timely claim with the county pursuant to the statutory claims provisions of the California Tort Claims Act. (Gov.Code, § 900 et seq.) ¹ Plaintiff challenges the Court of Appeal ruling on two separate grounds. First, he claims that the court erred in finding that the so-called "mentally incapacitated" tolling provision of section 911.4 does not entitle him to relief. Second, he maintains that, in any event, his action should have been permitted to go forward under sections 911.6 and 946.6 because past cases interpreting these provisions establish that so long as a late-claim application on behalf of a minor is filed within a year of the accrual of the minor's cause of action, as it was in this case, any delay by a parent or attorney in filing the claim is not a proper basis for barring the minor's action.

As we shall explain, although we find that the Court of Appeal properly determined that plaintiff was not entitled to invoke the tolling provision of section 911.4, we at the same time conclude that the controlling precedents support plaintiff's second contention. On this basis, we conclude that the judgment of the Court of Appeal must be reversed.

I

Plaintiff was born on June 24, 1981, at the Los Angeles County Hospital. According to the allegations contained in various claims filed on his behalf, as a result of negligent medical care provided by the county immediately before, during and after his birth, plaintiff suffers from profound mental retardation and severe physical handicaps.

Plaintiff's mother assertedly first learned that her son's mental and physical injuries may have resulted from the county's negligent medical care when she consulted an attorney in October 1981. After that consultation, the attorney sought to obtain plaintiff's medical records from the county; he succeeded in obtaining the records on December 24, 1981.

Two and one-half months later, on March 5, 1982, the attorney filed an application for leave to present a late claim with the county on behalf of plaintiff. The application acknowledged that a claim on plaintiff's behalf had not been filed within the 100-day period prescribed by section 911.2, but emphasized that the late-claim application was being presented within 1 year of the accrual of the minor's cause of action and requested that leave to file the late claim be granted "based on his minority." On April 7, 1982, the county denied the application to file a late claim, informing plaintiff that if he wished to challenge the denial he was required to file a petition in court pursuant to section 946.6 within six months.

On June 24, 1982, plaintiff's mother filed a petition in superior court seeking an order appointing her guardian ad litem for her son; the court granted the order that same day. Immediately thereafter, she filed a petition with the court on plaintiff's behalf, pursuant to section 946.6, requesting relief from the claim-filing requirements. Through the initial and subsequent petitions, plaintiff asserted that he was entitled to relief under section 946.6 because the county had erred in refusing to grant his late-claim application on two separate grounds. First, plaintiff contended that because he has been mentally incapacitated since birth, under section 911.4, subdivision (b) the time for filing a late-claim application did not even begin to run until his mother was formally appointed as his guardian ad litem on June 24, 1982; accordingly, he asserted that his late-claim application, presented in March 1982, was filed "within a reasonable time" as a matter of law and should have been granted. Second, plaintiff maintained that because his late-claim application was presented within a year of the accrual of his cause of action and because he was a minor during the entire claim-filing period, past cases established that his late-claim application should have been granted even if his parent or attorney had been somewhat dilatory in filing the application.

The trial court rejected plaintiff's contentions and denied the requested relief from the claim-filing requirement. The court found that section 911.4's tolling provision did not apply to a mentally incapacitated minor, and concluded that the petition failed to demonstrate that the late-claim application was filed "within a reasonable time" as required by section 911.4 because no sufficient explanation had been provided for the four-and-one-half-month delay between discovery of the cause of action in October 1981 and the filing of the late-claim application in March 1982. The Court of Appeal affirmed.

We granted review to resolve an apparent conflict between the Court of Appeal's application of the relevant claims statutes in this case and the application of these provisions in a number of earlier decisions.

II

The California Tort Claims Act provides that before an individual can bring an action for damages against a governmental entity, he must ordinarily present a claim to the relevant entity within 100 days of the accrual of his cause of action. (§§ 911.2, 945.4.) Past cases establish that, for purposes of the claims statutes, a minor's cause of action for medical malpractice--the type of action involved in this case--accrues when the minor's parent or guardian knew or should have known that the child's injuries were caused by negligent medical care. (See, e.g., Whitfield v. Roth (1974) 10 Cal.3d 874, 885, 112 Cal.Rptr. 540, 519 P.2d 588.) In the present case, plaintiff's pleadings indicate that his mother first learned of the negligent cause of his injuries in late October 1981 and, assuming that is true, the 100-day period would have expired sometime in early February 1982. Plaintiff concedes that no claim was filed with the county within that 100-day period.

In recognition of the short duration of the claim-filing period and to ameliorate the potential harshness of the 100-day rule, the Tort Claims Act establishes a procedure under which an injured person who has missed the 100-day deadline may file an application with the relevant governmental entity for leave to present a late claim. (§ 911.4 et seq.) Plaintiff resorted to that procedure in this case, filing a late-claim application on March 4, 1982, approximately one month after the one hundred- day period had ostensibly expired. The county rejected the late-claim application shortly thereafter. As noted, plaintiff maintains that the county erred in rejecting the claim as untimely and refusing to even consider its merits.

Plaintiff's initial contention rests on the provisions of section 911.4. That section reads in relevant part: "(a) When a claim that is required by Section 911.2 to be presented not later than the 100th day after the accrual of the cause of action is not presented within such time, a written application may be made to the public entity for leave to present such a claim. [p] (b) The application shall be presented to the public entity ... within a reasonable time not to exceed one year after the accrual of the cause of action and shall state the reason for the delay in presenting the claim. The proposed claim shall be attached to the application. In computing the one-year period under this subdivision, time during which the person who sustained the alleged injury, damage, or loss is a minor shall be counted, but the time during which he is mentally incapacitated and does not have a guardian or a conservator of his person shall not be counted." (Italics added.)

Relying on the concluding clause of the italicized sentence--the clause relating to mental incapacitation--plaintiff contends that because he has been mentally incapacitated for the entire period of his injury, the time for filing a late claim was tolled under this provision until his mother was formally appointed his guardian ad litem by the superior court on June 24, 1982. As a consequence, he asserts that his late-claim application, filed March 4, 1982, was presented even before the late-claim period had begun to run and consequently was filed "within a reasonable time" as a matter of law and should not properly have been rejected by the county. Plaintiff relies on two prior Court of Appeal opinions--David L. v. County of Riverside (1983) 140Cal.App.3d 282, 284-286, 189 Cal.Rptr. 333, and State of California v. Superior Court (1978) 86 Cal.App.3d 475, 479-483, 150 Cal.Rptr. 308--which interpreted the "mental incapacitation" clause in just such a fashion.

The county strongly takes issue with the interpretation of the emphasized sentence in these earlier cases, insisting that the sentence--taken as a whole and read in light of the purposes of the provision--was clearly intended to distinguish between minors, on the one hand, and mentally incapacitated persons who do not have a guardian or a conservator, on the other. With respect to minors, the statute makes clear that the normal late-claim time periods shall not be tolled; with respect to mentally incapacitated persons who lack a guardian or conservator, the time limitations shall be tolled. As the county points out,...