Nixon v. State

• Decision Date: 30 September 2005
• Docket Number: No. 03-1850.,03-1850.
• Citation: 704 N.W.2d 643
• Parties: Mary Irene NIXON, Kathryn L. Meacham, Tonya Dawn Tolbert, Personal Representative for the Estate of Phillip Spieker, Deceased, Russell D. Ehrhardt, Administrator of the Estate of Betty Romp, Deceased f/k/a Elizabeth Louis Ostert, Susan Dawson, Administrator of the Estate of Clarence E. Fifer, Deceased, and Hazel Potter Dornbush, Appellees, v. STATE of Iowa, Appellant.
• Court: Iowa Supreme Court

704 N.W.2d 643

Mary Irene NIXON, Kathryn L. Meacham, Tonya Dawn Tolbert, Personal Representative for the Estate of Phillip Spieker, Deceased, Russell D. Ehrhardt, Administrator of the Estate of Betty Romp, Deceased f/k/a Elizabeth Louis Ostert, Susan Dawson, Administrator of the Estate of Clarence E. Fifer, Deceased, and Hazel Potter Dornbush, Appellees, v. STATE of Iowa, Appellant.

No. 03-1850.

Supreme Court of Iowa.

September 30, 2005.

Rehearing Denied November 9, 2005.

Thomas J. Miller, Attorney General, Craig Kelinson, Special Assistant Attorney General, and Bruce Kempkes, Assistant Attorney General, for appellant.

Curtis J. Krull of Roehrick, Krull & Blumberg, Des Moines, and Eric Borseth of Borseth, Siebrecht & Siebrecht, Altoona, for appellee Nixon.

Evan A. Douthit, Randall L. Rhodes, and Mary C. O'Connell of Douthit Frets Rouse & Gentile, L.L.C., Kansas City, Missouri, for Kathryn L. Meacham, Tonya Dawn Tolbert, Russell D. Ehrhardt, Susan Dawson and Hazel Potter Dornbush, appellees.

STREIT, Justice.

The King can do no wrong, but will he do right by our orphans?¹ Over sixty-five years ago, a professor at the University of Iowa performed an experiment on children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home testing a theory regarding the origins of stuttering in young children. The children did not find out they were actual participants in the study for seven decades.

When the children did find out, they sued the State of Iowa for damages relating to their lifelong battle with speech problems. The State filed a motion to dismiss. The State claimed it had not waived its sovereign immunity for the plaintiffs' injuries. The district court overruled the motion. We likewise conclude the State waived its sovereign immunity and affirm.

I. Principles of Review

At the outset, it is important to point out the procedural posture of this case, because it affects our recitation of the facts. We review a district court's ruling on a motion to dismiss for correction of errors at law. Brubaker v. Estate of DeLong, 700 N.W.2d 323, 326 (Iowa 2005). A motion to dismiss should be granted only if the plaintiff's petition "on its face shows no right of recovery under any state of facts." Rees v. City of Shenandoah, 682 N.W.2d 77, 79 (Iowa 2004) (citation omitted). For this reason, we must view the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs. Id. Nothing in this opinion, therefore, should be construed as a ruling on the merits of the plaintiffs' claims.

II. Background Facts and Proceedings

In 1939, Professor Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa (f/k/a "The State University of Iowa") designed a study to test his diagnosogenic (or labeling) theory of stuttering. Professor Johnson believed nonstutterers could become stutterers if others labeled them as stutterers. Professor Johnson directed Mary Tudor, a graduate student at the University, to conduct the study on children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home.

To test Professor Johnson's theory, six nonstuttering children at the Home were told they were stutterers or were in danger of becoming stutterers. These children (or their respective estates) are the plaintiffs in the underlying action.² They were given negative "therapy" designed to make them stutter. At the conclusion of the study, Tudor concluded all six children displayed a loss of self-confidence, self-image, and self-esteem. Tudor observed detrimental effects on their speech delivery. Over the next few decades the experiment was labeled the "Monster Study," and the title persists today.

For over sixty years, no one told the children about the true nature of the study. In June 2001, however, a newspaper discovered the truth and published a story about the Monster Study.

In April 2003, the plaintiffs sued the State in the district court for intentional infliction of emotional distress, fraudulent misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty, invasion of privacy, and civil conspiracy. The plaintiffs claimed the State's tortious actions continued to the present day because it concealed the study from them over the years.

The State filed a motion to dismiss. It maintained the plaintiffs' claims failed because the alleged injuries occurred when the State was sovereignly immune, i.e., before the effective date of the Iowa Tort Claims Act. The district court, however, summarily concluded the petition "[c]ontain[ed] claims upon which relief may be granted" and denied the motion. The State applied for interlocutory review, which we granted. We will restrict our analysis to the pertinent argument in this case: Whether the State has waived its sovereign immunity for this claim under the Iowa Tort Claims Act.³

III. Analysis

At the time the State first injured the plaintiffs in 1939, it was immune from suit under the common-law doctrine of sovereign immunity. See Montandon v. Hargrave Constr. Co., 256 Iowa 1297, 1299-1300, 130 N.W.2d 659, 660 (1964)

. This doctrine came to the United States through the old English maxim that "the King can do no wrong" and was therefore not liable unless he first consented to the suit. See generally Erwin Chemerinsky, Shifting the Balance of Power? The Supreme Court, Federalism, and State Sovereign Immunity, 53 Stan. L.Rev. 1201, 1201-02 (2001). The reasons usually advanced for the doctrine's support were "public policy, absurdity of a wrong committed by an entire people, impossibility of carrying on governmental functions if tax money is diverted, and the government's status as a nonprofit organization." Torts-Governmental Immunity — Iowa Reaffirmation (Boyer v. Iowa High School Athletic Ass'n (Iowa 1964)), 50 Iowa L.Rev. 226, 227 n.5 (1964) (citations omitted). For nearly 100 years, the doctrine of sovereign immunity was the law of our state, but by the mid-1960s, the doctrine had become the subject of a great deal of criticism by both commentators and the courts. Boyer v. Iowa High School Athletic Ass'n, 256 Iowa 337, 342-43, 127 N.W.2d 606, 609-10 (1964). In the 1964 decision, Boyer v. Iowa High School Athletic Association, we were directly confronted with whether the doctrine "should be abrogated in Iowa as outmoded, harsh and not in keeping with the modern trend of the law." Id. at 339, 127 N.W.2d at 607. Our five-to-four majority opinion concluded that "abrogation of the doctrine should come from legislative, not judicial action." Id. In a vigorous dissent, Justice Moore argued:

The whole doctrine of governmental immunity from liability for tort rests upon a rotten foundation. It is almost incredible that in this modern age of comparative sociological enlightenment, and in a republic, the medieval absolutism supposed to be implicit in the maxim, "the King can do no wrong," should exempt the various branches of the government from liability for their torts, and that the entire burden of damage resulting from the wrongful acts of the government should be imposed upon the single individual who suffers the injury, rather than distributed among the entire community constituting the government, where it could be borne without hardship upon any individual, and where it justly belongs.

Id. at 349-50, 127 N.W.2d at 613 (Moore, J. dissenting) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). The Iowa Legislature settled this debate one year later when it enacted the Iowa Tort Claims Act waiving the State's immunity and permitting it to be sued much like any other private individual. See 1965 Iowa Acts ch. 79. But apparently this forty-year-old debate concerning the king's liability for his past indiscretions still simmers within our court today.

As presently written, the Iowa Tort Claims Act contains a statute of limitations that bars certain stale claims. The Act states:

Every claim and suit permitted under this chapter shall be forever barred, unless within two years after such claim accrued, the claim is made in writing to the state appeal board under this chapter.

Iowa Code § 669.13 (2005) (emphasis added). Precedent clearly holds a claim does not "accrue" until the plaintiff "discovers the injury or by the exercise of reasonable diligence should have discovered it." Vachon v. State, 514 N.W.2d 442, 445 (Iowa 1994); see also Trobaugh v. Sondag, 668 N.W.2d 577, 581 (Iowa 2003)

; Callahan v. State, 464 N.W.2d 268, 271 (Iowa 1990). It is undisputed that the plaintiffs made their claims in writing to the state appeal board within two years after discovering the cause of their injuries. For this reason, the plain and unambiguous language of the limitations provision of the Iowa Torts Claims Act does not bar their cause of action. The district court should be affirmed for this reason. See Coralville Hotel Assocs., L.C. v. City of Coralville, 684 N.W.2d 245, 248 (Iowa 2004) ("[P]recise and unambiguous language should be given its plain and rational meaning without resort to the rules of statutory construction.").

The State urges us, however, to go beyond the statutory text to divine legislative intent. It asks us to travel forty years into the past to resurrect a "sunrise" provision the legislature repealed long ago. For as originally enacted, the Iowa Tort Claims Act contained the following language:

[A] `claim' includes only such claims accruing on or after January 1, 1963. . . .

1965 Iowa Acts ch. 79, § 2(5), repealed by 1969 Iowa Acts ch. 81, § 2. Based upon this repealed "sunrise" provision — as well as a long-repudiated judicial construction of the verb "to accrue" as "to occur" — the State concludes the Iowa Torts Claim Act is intended to bar all claims for injuries that occurred before January 1, 1963. The Iowa Tort Claims Act, the State paradoxically concludes, means what it does not say; indeed, the State interprets the Act to say what the legislature explicitly said it does not say when it repealed the relied-upon language in 1969. The State effectively asks us to reenact statutory language the legislature repealed long ago. We will not do so. See Doe v. Ray, 251...