Townsend v. Townsend

• Decision Date: 15 April 1986
• Docket Number: No. 67602,67602
• Citation: 708 S.W.2d 646
• Parties: Diana TOWNSEND, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. James E. TOWNSEND, Defendant-Respondent.
• Court: Missouri Supreme Court

Page 646

708 S.W.2d 646

Diana TOWNSEND, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. James E. TOWNSEND, Defendant-Respondent.

No. 67602.

Supreme Court of Missouri En Banc.

April 15, 1986.

Robert B. Satchell, Union, for plaintiff-appellant.

James C. Ochs, Clifford Schwartz and Charles M. Shaw, Clayton, for defendant-respondent.

RENDLEN, Judge.

The principal issue for resolution is whether the common law doctrine of interspousal immunity shall remain a bar against claims for personal injuries inflicted by one spouse against the other during marriage.

Appellant Diana Townsend filed action against her husband seeking damages for personal injuries suffered when he shot her in the back with a shotgun as he attempted to enter her residence. It was alleged the shooting was "intentional and malicious in that [d]efendant acted with a purpose to seriously injure or kill the [p]laintiff by means of a deadly weapon," causing injuries which entitled her to compensatory and punitive damages. ¹

Respondent moved for summary judgment, raising as a bar the doctrine of interspousal immunity and on the issues thus framed the trial court entered the summary judgment for respondent. Appeal was taken to the Court of Appeals-Eastern District and prior to opinion, transfer was granted that we might examine the issue presented which is both of general interest and special importance. Mo.Const., art. V, § 10; Rules 83.02, 83.06.

Long established common law principles authorize courts to compel tort-feasors to compensate those they intentionally or negligently injure. Steggall v. Morris, 363 Mo. 1224, 258 S.W.2d 577 (Mo. banc 1953). Finding insufficient support remaining for the proposition that tort-feasors should escape liability for injuries they inflict because the victim happens to be their spouse, we today abolish the doctrine of interspousal immunity as a bar to claims for intentional torts. This step, though a departure from earlier Missouri case law, recognizes that the doctrine from its origin had been a rule in search of a rationale and that the bases advanced in prior years for its support have been substantially diluted or simply disappeared. ²

Interspousal tort immunity flowed as a by-product from the common law concept of oneness or the "identity of spouses." "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband." 1 W. Blackstone Commentaries 442. Suspension of the wife's personal and property rights meant "that she lost the capacity to contract for herself, or to sue or be sued without joining the husband as plaintiff or defendant." W. Prosser, The Law of Torts 859-860 (4th ed. 1971). ³ This concept made suits between husband and wife virtually impossible; because if either was plaintiff in suits against the other it was deemed that the husband sued himself.

Missouri, as did other states in varying degrees, modified the rule in 1855 by granting a married woman her legal identity. This was first accomplished through exception to joinder rules in our civil procedure statutes. ⁴ Thirty-four years later the Married Women's Act more substantively defined the scope of a married woman's legal identity. Chapter 109, RSMo 1889. Section 6864 of the act deemed a married woman a "femme sole" for the purposes of "transact[ing] business ... to contract and be contracted with, to sue and be sued, and to enforce and have enforced against her property such judgments as may be rendered for and against her, and may sue and be sued at law or in equity, with or without her husband being joined as a party ..." (emphasis added). ⁵

The crucial question never squarely addressed by the Court was whether that language abrogated the common law unity fiction for purposes of interspousal torts. In Rogers v. Rogers, 265 Mo. 200, 177 S.W. 382 (1915), the act was only nominally construed in dismissing a wife's false imprisonment action against her husband. Though sometimes characterized as procedural and on other occasions as substantive, § 8304, RSMo 1909, was found to be a definitive declaration of women's rights as a "femme sole." However, the entrenched unity doctrine played a continuing role in the narrow "statutory construction" resulting in this Court's refusal to depart from the archaic doctrine absent express legislative authority. ⁶ "Whether the absence of this authority is due to the doctrine of the unity created by the marriage relation, or to any effort on the part of legislatures and courts to promote harmony or at least lessen the cause of controversy between the husband and wife, the nonexistence of the husband's [and thus the wife's] right in this regard uniformly prevails." 177 S.W. at 384. ⁷

The narrow statutory construction of Rogers, flowing from the unity fiction, persists in Missouri, despite a thirty-year trend away from strict application of interspousal immunity. Following the 1915 decision in Rogers the bar to interspousal tort actions was classified as substantive, the Court finding that no cause of action for personal injuries between husband and wife arose at common law. Willott v. Willott, 333 Mo. 896, 62 S.W.2d 1084, 1085 (1933). Yet legislative inaction in the face of Rogers, was in the end analysis given as justification for the decision. Id. 62 S.W.2d at 1085-86.

However, in Mullally v. Langenberg Bros. Grain Co., 339 Mo. 582, 98 S.W.2d 645 (1936), a wife was allowed to sue her husband's employer for her injuries suffered as a result of acts by the husband in the course of his employment. Quoting Judge Cardozo, the Court found the negligent or willful acts upon the person of a wife did not cease to be unlawful because the law exempted the husband from liability. Id. 98 S.W.2d at 646, citing Schubert v. Schubert Wagon Co., 249 N.Y. 253, 164 N.E. 42, (1928). However, the Mullally Court reasoned that indemnification by employee to employer would be based on breach of duty to the employer and not on the tort victim's cause of action.

In Hamilton v. Fulkerson, 285 S.W.2d 642 (Mo.1955), the narrow statutory construction of Rogers was again circumvented to allow a wife to sue her husband for injuries sustained by his negligent operation of an automobile before their marriage. There the Court construed a Married Women's Act provision making rights of action possessed by a woman at marriage separate property as an abrogation of the unity doctrine for antenuptial torts. Section 451.250.1, RSMo 1978. "Irrespective of statutes, any common law rule based on the fiction of the identity of husband and wife, long since contrary to the fact, should not be applied to any 'first impression' fact situation arising in this state." 285 S.W.2d at 645.

The unity fiction was also found inapplicable where a wife sought to sue the administrator of her deceased husband's estate for the negligent acts of her husband during their marriage. Ennis v. Truhitte, 306 S.W.2d 549 (Mo. banc 1957) (overruled in Ebel v. Ferguson, 478 S.W.2d 334, 336 (Mo. banc 1972)). With the husband dead, there was no marital relationship to disturb and thus no policy basis for applying the rule.

The trend toward liberalization came to a halt in Brawner v. Brawner, 327 S.W.2d 808 (Mo. banc 1959), cert. denied, 361 U.S. 964, 80 S.Ct. 595, 4 L.Ed.2d 546 (1960). Distinguishing earlier cases of interspousal tort recoveries as special circumstances, the Court found itself "in [no] better position to interpret the legislative intent of these statutes than the courts that decided the Rogers case in 1915 and the Willott case in 1933." Id. at 811. Against the confusing backdrop of the Rogers, Hamilton, Ennis and Brawner cases, this Court in its most recent decision on the issue retreated further, refusing to "create a cause of action" where, due to the unity fiction, "no cause of action [comes] into existence during the marriage." Ebel v. Ferguson, 478 S.W.2d 334, 336 (Mo. banc 1972).

Although not addressed in Ebel, the Court in Novak v. Kansas City Transit, Inc., 365 S.W.2d 539 (Mo. banc 1963) reversed a trial court decision which had barred a wife from recovering for the loss of consortium of her husband on the theory of the common law suspension of the wife's legal existence during the marriage. Missouri's Married Women's Act (present §§ 451.250-451.300), it was argued, did not create any rights not available at common law but only removed those disabilities specified in statute, not including right to loss of consortium. In rejecting that argument, the Novak Court found the scope and purpose of the Married Women's Act to be comprehensive, relying on an earlier construction in Clow v. Chapman, 125 Mo. 101, 28 S.W. 328 (1894). The Married Women's Act statutes, as a whole, were found to have placed the wife's legal existence on an equal footing with her husband, and to ignore those rights because they were not specifically recognized in common law was considered "no more than adhering to a barren technicality." Novak at 541.

The statutes, when considered in their full scope and purpose, give the wife a separate legal existence, whereas before her legal existence was considered merged into that of her husband, and for this reason and for no other she could not maintain the action. New rights and new obligations necessarily arise from the changed condition, as incidents thereto. When she is given the sole control of her personal property, and the right to recover the same by her own suit, it might follow as an incident, that she has the right to make contracts in respect of such property, though the statute may not, in terms, give her the right to make contracts in relation thereto.

Novak at 541, quoting Clow, 28 S.W. at 330.

Today we reject the archaic doctrine embraced in Ebel and Rogers. Those decisions as well as related cases employing the doctrine of interspousal immunity in intentional tort actions are...