McGuire v. Almy
| Decision Date | 25 May 1937 |
| Citation | 297 Mass. 323,8 N.E.2d 760 |
| Parties | FLORENCE A. MCGUIRE v. DOROTHY B. ALMY. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
March 2, 1937.
Present: RUGG, C.
Insane Person. Actionable Tort. Assault and Battery. An insane person is liable for an intentional assault.
The evidence warranted a finding that a nurse, trying to disarm an insane person, had not assumed the risk of an assault by him.
TORT. Writ in the Superior Court dated December 6, 1932, and afterwards amended.
The action was tried before Cox, J., who denied a motion that a verdict be ordered for the defendant, and reported the case after a verdict for the plaintiff in the sum of $1,500.
J. E. Farley, for the defendant. J. P. Kane, for the plaintiff.
This is an action of tort for assault and battery. The only question of law reported is whether the judge should have directed a verdict for the defendant.
The following facts are established by the plaintiff's own evidence: In August, 1930, the plaintiff was employed to take care of the defendant. The plaintiff was a registered nurse and was a graduate of a training school for nurses. The defendant was an insane person. Before the plaintiff was hired she learned that the defendant was a "mental case and was in good physical condition," and that for some time two nurses had been taking care of her. The plaintiff was on "twenty-four hour duty." The plaintiff slept in the room next to the defendant's room. Except when the plaintiff was with the defendant, the plaintiff kept the defendant locked in the defendant's room. There was a wire grating over the outside of the window of that room. During the period of "fourteen months or so" while the plaintiff cared for the defendant, the defendant "had a few odd spells," when she showed some hostility to the plaintiff and said that "she would like to try and do something to her." The defendant had been violent at times and had broken dishes "and things like that," and on one or two occasions the plaintiff had to have help to subdue the defendant.
On April 19, 1932 the defendant, while locked in her room, had a violent attack. The plaintiff heard a crashing of furniture and then knew that the defendant was ugly, violent and dangerous. The defendant told the plaintiff and a Miss Maroney, "the maid," who was with the plaintiff in the adjoining room that if they came into the defendant's room, she would kill them. The plaintiff and Miss Maroney looked into the defendant's room, "saw what the defendant had done," and "thought it best to take the broken stuff away before she did any harm to herself with it." They sent for one Emerton, the defendant's brother-in-law. When he arrived the defendant was in the middle of her room about ten feet from the door, holding upraised the leg of a low-boy as if she were going to strike. The plaintiff stepped into the room and walked toward the defendant, while Emerton and Miss Maroney remained in the doorway. As the plaintiff approached the defendant and tried to take hold of the defendant's hand which held the leg, the defendant struck the plaintiff's head with it, causing the injuries for which the action was brought.
The extent to which an insane person is liable for torts has not been fully defined in this Commonwealth. Dickinson v. Barber, 9 Mass. 225 , turned upon questions of evidence in an action for slander. However, the implication of the case seems to favor liability. In Lawton v. Sun Mutual Ins. Co. 2 Cush. 500, at page 516, it is said that one "bereft of reason and judgment, and the use of his moral powers and intellectual faculties . . . is no longer a responsible being . . . and his acts must be considered as pure accidents." In Brown v. Howe, 9 Gray, 84, it was held that the guardian of a lunatic cannot credit himself in his probate account with a sum intended to represent his personal loss from the negligent burning of his house by his ward. Here it seems to have been assumed that an action at law might lie. In Morain v. Devlin, 132 Mass. 87 , this court said, through Chief Justice Gray, "By the common law, as generally stated in the books, a lunatic is civilly liable to make compensation in damages to persons injured by his acts, although, being incapable of criminal intent, he is not liable to indictment and punishment," citing numerous cases (page 88). But the actual decision went no further than to hold the lunatic, as a landowner receiving the benefits of ownership, liable for the defective condition of his premises. In Daniels v. New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, 183 Mass. 393, Sponatski's Case, 220 Mass. 526 , and Tetrault's Case, 278 Mass. 447, the rule was laid down that where an accident causes insanity, and while insane the victim takes his own life, the causal connection between the accident and the death is broken by the voluntary act of the insane person, if he entertains the purpose of causing his death and understands the physical effect of his acts, even though his mind is so far impaired that he can no longer form sound judgments or weigh the reasons which should induce him to refrain from the act; but that causal connection is not broken if the act results from uncontrollable impulse, delirium or frenzy without conscious volition. A somewhat similar rule has been worked out for determining when an insane person has committed suicide within the meaning of a clause in an insurance policy which excludes liability for suicidal death. Dean v. American Mutual Life Ins. Co. 4 Allen, 96. Cooper v. Massachusetts Mutual Life Ins. Co. 102 Mass. 227. These accident and insurance cases are not controlling in the present case, for here the question is not one of causation, but is a question as to how far the subjective standard is admissible as governing the obligations of an insane person to others.
Turning to authorities elsewhere, we find that courts in this country almost invariably say in the broadest terms that an insane person is liable for his torts. As a rule no distinction is made between those torts which would ordinarily be classed as intentional and those which would ordinarily be classed as negligent, nor do the courts discuss the effect of different kinds of insanity or of varying degrees of capacity as bearing upon the ability of the defendant to understand the particular act in question or to make a reasoned decision with respect to it, although it is sometimes said that an insane person is not liable for torts requiring malice of which he is incapable. Defamation and malicious prosecution are the torts more commonly mentioned in this connection. A number of illustrative cases appear in the footnote. [*] These decisions are rested more upon grounds of public policy and upon what might be called a popular view of the requirements of essential justice than upon any attempt to apply logically the underlying principles of civil liability to the special instance of the mentally deranged. Thus it is said that a rule imposing liability tends to make more watchful those persons who have charge of the defendant and who may be supposed to have some interest in preserving his property; that as an insane person must pay for his support, if he is financially able, so he ought also to pay for the damage which he does; that an insane person with abundant wealth ought not to continue in unimpaired enjoyment of the comfort which it brings while his victim bears the burden unaided; and there is also a suggestion that courts are loath to introduce into the great body of civil litigation the difficulties in determining mental capacity which it has been found impossible to avoid in the criminal field.
The rule established in these cases has been criticized severely by certain eminent text writers both in this country and in England, principally on the ground that it is an archaic survival of the rigid and formal medieval conception of liability for acts done, without regard to fault, as opposed to what is said to be the general modern theory that liability in tort should rest upon fault. Notwithstanding these criticisms, we think that as a practical matter there is strong force in the reasons underlying these decisions. They are consistent with the general statements found in the cases dealing with the liability of infants for torts, Sikes v. Johnson, 16 Mass. 389 , Homer v. Thwing, 3 Pick. 492, Slayton v. Barry, 175 Mass. 513, 514, Dow v. Lipsitz, 283 Mass. 132 , 134, including a few cases in which the child was so young as to render his capacity for fault comparable to that of many insane persons, Huchting v. Engel, 17 Wis. 230, Briese v. Maechtle, 146 Wis. 89, Gillespie v. McGowan, 100 Penn. St. 144, 149, Peterson v. Haffner,
6 Mart. (Ind.) 130, Stephens v. Stephens, 172 Ky. 780. Fault is by no means at the present day...
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