Williams v. Bright

• Decision Date: 05 June 1997
• Citation: 658 N.Y.S.2d 910,230 A.D.2d 548
• Parties: Charles WILLIAMS, et al., Plaintiffs, and Gwendolyn Robbins, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Leslie A. BRIGHT, et al., Defendants-Appellants.
• Court: New York Supreme Court — Appellate Division

Page 910

658 N.Y.S.2d 910

230 A.D.2d 548

Charles WILLIAMS, et al., Plaintiffs and Gwendolyn Robbins, Plaintiff-Respondent, v. Leslie A. BRIGHT, et al., Defendants-Appellants.

Supreme Court, Appellate Division First Department.

June 5, 1997.

Kathleen Peratis, of counsel (Richard Frank, P.C., attorney) for plaintiff-respondent.

Herbert Rubin, of counsel (Michael Hoenig, Aaron D. Twerski, David B. Hamm and Miriam Skolnik on the brief, Herzfeld & Rubin, P.C., attorneys) for defendants-appellants.

Donald T. Ridley, attorney, on behalf of Watchtower Bible and Tract Society as Amicus Curiae.

Lois C. Waldman, on the brief (Marc D. Stern, attorney) on behalf of American Jewish Congress as Amicus Curiae.

Before ROSENBERGER, J.P., and WALLACH, NARDELLI and TOM, JJ.

WALLACH, Justice.

Plaintiff Robbins was a passenger in an automobile driven by her 70-year-old father on an upstate highway. An eyewitness saw the car veer off the road at about 65 mph and turn over in a culvert on adjoining farmland. There was circumstantial evidence that the driver, who had driven with this plaintiff and other family members early that morning from New York City to Plattsburgh and was returning the same day, had fallen asleep at the wheel. This was conduct that the jury found to be both negligent and a proximate cause of the accident. On this appeal, defendants, who include the lessors of the vehicle, do not seriously contest liability; the main issue is the trial court's treatment of plaintiff Robbins' alleged failure to mitigate damages due to her religious beliefs as a Jehovah's Witness.

The central question for us, on appellate review, is not merely the admeasurement of plaintiff's damages under the application of traditional tort law standards, but the broader controversy involving plaintiff's beliefs and their proper effect upon her monetary award. That, in turn, obliges us to grapple with grave constitutional issues ordinarily not involved in a motor vehicle accident--even one as tragic and catastrophic ¹ as this one.

I.

For a hundred years it has been settled law in this state that a party who claims to have suffered damage by the tort of another is bound "to use reasonable and proper efforts to make the damage as small as practicable" (Blate v. Third Ave. R.R. Co., 44 App.Div. l63, 167, 60 N.Y.S. 732), and if an injured party allows the damages to be unnecessarily enhanced, the incurred loss justly falls upon him (Hamilton v. McPherson, 28 N.Y. 72, 77).

Plaintiff Robbins suffered a severely damaged left hip, as well as a painful injury to her right knee. Her own expert testified that if these injuries were not alleviated by well recognized and universally accepted surgical procedures, her prognosis was for a wheelchair-bound life because of the inevitability of necrotic development in the bone structure of these limbs. Moreover, all the experts agreed that the surgical intervention available to this plaintiff (52 years of age at the time of the accident) offered her the prospect of a good recovery and a near normal life. However, Robbins, a devout Jehovah's Witness, presented proof (chiefly from her own hospital records) that she was obliged to refuse these recommended surgeries because her church prohibits the blood transfusions they would necessarily entail.

In accordance with settled law, the New York pattern jury instruction on the subject of damage mitigation refers to the actions of "a reasonably prudent person" (PJI 2:325) and measures the duty to mitigate in accordance with that standard. ² Although the trial court acquainted the jury with the existence of that standard, it charged that in this case the standard to be applied was something very different (our emphasis added):

You have to accept as a given that the dictates of her religion forbid blood transfusions.

And so you have to determine ... whether she ... acted reasonably as a Jehovah's Witness in refusing surgery which would involve blood transfusions.

Was it reasonable for her, not what you would do or your friends or family, was it reasonable for her given her beliefs, without questioning the validity or the propriety of her beliefs?

In abandoning the "reasonably prudent person" test in favor of a "reasonable Jehovah's Witness" standard, over defendants' objection, the trial court perceived the issue as involving this plaintiff's fundamental right to the free exercise of her religion, protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and article I, § 3 of our State Constitution (167 Misc.2d 312, 632 N.Y.S.2d 760). The First Amendment prohibits any law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Essentially, the court held that if the jury were permitted to assess this plaintiff's refusal to accept additional surgery without total deference to her religious beliefs, it would unlawfully restrain "the free exercise" of her Jehovah's Witness faith and would thus be constitutionally prohibited. In effect, this plaintiff's religious beliefs were held, as a matter of law, to relieve her of any legal obligation to mitigate damages under the same standard required of all other persons similarly situated who do not share similar religious convictions.

Prior to this action, New York courts have rarely dealt with the issue of a plaintiff whose medical care was limited by her religious beliefs. Virtually all of the handful of jurisdictions to have considered the question have adopted the test of the reasonably prudent person instead of the formulation employed here. (See, e.g., Munn v. Algee, 924 F.2d 568 [5th Cir], cert denied 502 U.S. 900, 112 S.Ct. 277, 116 L.Ed.2d 229; Corlett v. Caserta, 204 Ill.App.3d 403, 413-14, 149 Ill.Dec. 793, 799, 562 N.E.2d 257, 263; Shorter v. Drury, 103 Wash.2d 645, 659, 695 P.2d 116, 124, cert denied 474 U.S. 827, 106 S.Ct. 86, 88 L.Ed.2d 70; see also, Walter Nashert and Sons v. McCann, 460 P.2d 941 [Okla].)

In our view, the analysis of the trial court contained many flaws. The first error was in defining the fundamental issue as whether any jury verdict could be permitted to conflict with this plaintiff's "religious belief that it may be better to suffer present pain than to be barred from entering the Kingdom of Heaven" (167 Misc.2d, at 318, 632 N.Y.S.2d 760). ³ With all due deference, this is not the question that should have been presented; to put it in this manner inevitably skews the result. ⁴

No one suggests that the State, or, for that matter, anyone else, has the right to interfere with that religious belief. But the real issue here is whether the consequences of that belief must be fully paid for here on earth by someone other than the injured believer. According to the trial court, the State has little interest in enforcing its general rule of damage mitigation simply to rescue a wrongdoer from the full consequences of his tortious conduct. This simplistic formulation has little application to the realities of this case. Here, the "wrongdoer," who fell asleep at the wheel, paid for his "fault" with his life. The respondents in damages (defendant car leasing company and its insurance carrier) must answer for the harm under the derivative liability imposed by Vehicle and Traffic Law § 388, which expresses the State's interest in cost allocation among that segment of the public that pays automobile insurance premiums.

Of course, the State does not have any interest in the question of who wins this lawsuit, or the extent to which one party prevails over the other. But the State does have a compelling interest in assuring that the proceedings before its civil tribunals are fair, and that any litigant is not improperly advantaged or disadvantaged by adherence to a particular set of religious principles. The State also has a compelling interest, by constitutional command under the Fourteenth Amendment, to extend equal protection of the law to every person haled before its courts. A derivative tortfeasor is certainly entitled to no less equal protection, in this regard, than an individual under criminal indictment.

Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 USC § 2000bb-1), a State's effort to impose a substantial burden upon an individual's free exercise of religion may only be justified in the presence of a compelling governmental interest. For example, a State's interest in establishing eligibility rules for unemployment compensation cannot justify forcing a Sabbatarian applicant to accept work on her day of rest (Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398, 83 S.Ct. 1790, 10 L.Ed.2d 965), or requiring Amish children to attend public school in contravention of their religious tenets and practice (Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 92 S.Ct. 1526, 32 L.Ed.2d 15).

An order emanating from a State court constitutes "state action" which, under the Fourteenth Amendment, would trigger First Amendment protections (Cohen v. Cowles Media Co., 501 U.S. 663, 668, 111 S.Ct. 2513, 2517-18, 115 L.Ed.2d 586). The trial court's instruction to the jurors on mitigation directed them to pass upon the reasonableness of plaintiff Robbins' objection, on religious grounds, to a blood transfusion. The fallacy in this instruction was that the jury never received any evidence pertaining to the rationale of her religious convictions, nor how universally accepted they may have been by members of her faith. True, there were entries in her medical records that she refused blood transfusions because she was a Jehovah's Witness, and there was brief testimony (in the context of presenting her diminished physical capabilities) that she attended Jehovah's Witness prayer services. But there was no evidence of the basis for the religious prohibition of blood transfusions. The charge thus created a sham inquiry; instead of framing an issue on how plaintiff Robbins' religious beliefs impacted on mitigation, the court foreclosed the issue in her favor without any supporting evidence. Let ...