Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Echols
Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Echols
Opinion of the Court
Previous appeals in the course of this litigation are reported' in Louisville & N. R. R. Co. v. Gray, 191 Ala. 514, 67 South. 687, and in 74 South. 228, 1 the later report containing an extended statement of the circumstances under which Gray, an employé in defendant’s (appellant’s) shops' at New Decatur (now Albany), Ala., was injured on, to wit, August 24, 1912, and from which injury it is averred in amended, counts 4 and 5 and shown by tendencies of the evidence, he died on June 5 or 6, 1916. The report of the appeal will contain count 4, added by amendment, which, for all presently practical purposes except as otherwise later stated, is the same as count 5.
The injured employs, Gray, instituted his action for damages on October 7, 1912, approximately 44 days after the date on which he was injured. There were two trials of his action in the court below, and reversal by this court of the judgment in each. The original complaint, together with its amendment, effected while the original plaintiff was living, consisted of five counts. In none of them was it averred in any way that Gray was, when injured, engaged in a service referable, discriminatively, either to intraor interstate commerce. All of these counts were, as we interpret them, silent in that respect. The interpolation therein of an averment that the engine upon which Gray was at the time at work was an instrumentality of the carrier’s service in interstate commerce would not have introduced an allegation inconsistent with any other averment in these five counts. The averment common to these five counts, that the defendant operated a line of railway through Morgan comity, Ala., or through the town in which its shops were located, was an allegation not at all inconsistent with the interstate service expressly averred in counts 4 and 5, introduced by an amendment allowed by the court below after the death of the plaintiff, Gray.
It is true this court on last appeal referred to counts composing the original complaint, and its amendments effected during the life of the original plaintiff, as declaring upon causes of action under the Alabama employers’ liability statute (Code 1907, § 3910); but this pronouncement did not involve the discriminative consideration that is now required, there being no suggestion in the record on either of the trials in the court below, or on review here, that the service in which Gray was engaged when he was injured was related in any way to interstate commerce, and hence subject to the control of the federal Employers’ Liability Act (TJ. 5. Comp. St. §§ 8657-8665). So the amended complaint stood at the time of the death' of the original plaintiff, employe, as not expressly declaring upon or under the Alabama or the federal statute, but as, and only, aver *629 ring facts descriptive of the quo modo and means of his injury, and attributing the injury to culpable conduct or omission, of coemployés whose particular dereliction, if established, may have been such under either the Alabama or the federal act, provided the evidence subsequently taken did not assign their asserted faults to the control, paramount and exclusive (Ex parte A. C. L. R. Co., 190 Ala. 132, 67 South. 256; L. & N. R. Co. v. Carter, 195 Ala. 383, 70 South. 655, Ann. Cas. 1917E, 292), of the federal act. This status, existing at the time of the death of the original plaintiff, will be later adverted to in another connection.
The amendment, allowed and effected on July 23, 1918, by Gray’s personal representative (appellee), introduced, as stated, counts 4 and 5. The verdict of the jury referred and restricted the conclusion of liability to these counts (4 and 5), alone. Count 4 ascribed Gray’s injury in August, 1912, and his death in 1916 from that injury, to the negligence of a hostler, Taylor, in moving a live engine against the unattached and slightly separated tender of the dead engine (assigned to and used in interstate service) upon which' Gray was averred to have been then engaged in repair work at the roundhouse of the defendant. Count 5, after like allegation of the facts, ascribed Gray’s injury, and death 4 years later, to the negligence of defendant’s foreman, Weatherly, in directing the hostler to move the live engine against the tender of this dead engine without proper care to warn Gray, or to conserve the safety of Gray, whose presence about the dead engine, in a -position of danger if it was moved, was known, or should, by the exercise of due diligence, have become known, to Weatherly before he gave the order or signal to the hostler Taylor, to move his engine to an impact with the nearby tender of the dead engine.
The rulings of the trial court, allowing the amendment adding counts 4 and 5, overruling the motion to strike these counts, and'refusing general affirmative instructions against a recovery upon these counts, were correctly made, under the doctrine of the authority afforded by St. Louis, etc., Ry. v. Craft, 237 U. S. 648, 35 Sup. Ct. 704, 59 L. Ed. 1160, particularly in the approval there given of North. Pac. Ry. v. Maerkl, 198 Fed. 1, 117 C. C. A. 237, and M., K. & T. R. Co. v. Wulf, 226 U. S. 570, 33 Sup. Ct. 135, 57 L. Ed. 355, Ann. Cas. 1914B, 134, and B. & O. R. Co. v. Smith, 246 U. S. 653, 38 Sup. Ct. 335, 62 L. Ed. 922, affirming, on error, the decision in that case of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, reported in 169 Ky. 593, 184 S. W. 1108, L. R. A. 1918F, 1205, especially page 1214. The doctrine of these cases appears to be supported by others therein cited.
*630 Section 9 of the amended (in 1910) federal Employers’ Liability Act provides:
“That any right of action given by this act to a person suffering injury shall survive to his or her personal representative, for the benefit of the surviving widow or husband and children of such employe, and, if none, then of such employe’s parents; and, if none, then of the next of tin dependent upon such employe, but in such cases there shall be only one recovery for the same injury.”
“Much stress is laid upon the concluding clause in the new section, ‘but in such cases there shall be only one recovery for the same injury.’ Passing and reserving the question of its application where there has been a recovery by the decedent in his lifetime (see Michigan Central R. R. v. Vreeland, supra, 227 U. S. 70), we think this clause, as applied to cases like the present, is not intended to restrict the personal representative to one right to the exclusion of the other, or to require that he make a choice between them, but to limit him to one recovery of damages for both, and so to avoid the needless litigation in separate actions of what would better be settled once for all in a single action. This view gives full effect to every word in the clause and ascribes to it a reasonable purpose without bringing it into conflict with other provisions the terms of which are plain and unequivocal. Had Congress intended that the personal representative should make an election between the two rights of action and sue upon one only, it is not easy to believe that it would have chosen the words in this clause to ’express that intention.”
[6] In such state of statutory provision and interpretation it cannot, we think, be soundly, generally affirmed that two distinct causes of action, made so alone by the subsequent death of the injured employe are created by the federal act, where the “same wrongful act or neglect” causéd both the injury and, after a legally appreciable period, the employes death. It follows that the delay, in this instance over two years after Gray’s death, in introducing into the pleadings in the pending action a claim for the damages consequent upon Gray’s death in June, 1916, was not offensive to the 2-year limitation fixed in section 6 of the amended federal act, did not operate a departure in law or fact, and the amendment introducing counts 4 and 5 must be referred for its relation tp the time, after Gray’s death, when it might first have been constituted a part of the pleading in the cause. This conclusion accords with that stated, in a pertinent particular, in B. & O. R. Co. v. Smith, 169 Ky. 593, 184 S. W. 1108 L. R. A. 1918F, 1214, and 246 U. S. 653, 38 Sup. Ct. 335, 62 L. Ed. 922. Of course if no action for the “same wrongful act or neglect” had been pending the while, the failure of the personal, representative to institute an original suit within the 2-year period after Gray’s death in 1916 would have concluded the right to recover in any event.
*631 This personal representative, suing through counts 4 and 5 for the benefit of Gray’s widow and minor child, claims damages for the mental and physical suffering endured by Gray during the period intervening between his injury in 1912 and his death in 1916, the pecuniary loss resulting from Gray’s permanent injury and consequent inability to earn money, and the loss accruing to his widow and minor child from Gray’s death in 1916. The court recognized the right of the plaintiff (administrator) to recover, in the one action, for these several elements of damage. In so instructing the jury, the court conformed its direction in this particular to the amended federal Employers’ Liability Act as construed in St. Louis, etc., R. Co. v. Craft, supra. These several elements of damage were correctly claimed by the personal representative as plaintiff for the benefit of the beneficiaries named in counts 4 and 5. Our case of L. & N. R. Co. v. Fleming, 194 Ala. 51, 69 South. 125, holds nothing to the contrary.
There was no error committted in the rulings on the admission of evidence. For the error indicated, the judgment is reversed, and the cause is remanded.
Reversed and remanded.
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