Sixth Circuit Says Drunk Driver's Death Is No Accident
Last month, I wrote about a decision from federal court for the Northern District of West Virginia in which the court awarded death benefits to a widow whose husband died of a drug overdose. Judge Irene Keeley held, in a thorough opinion, that the husband’s death was accidental, not intentional, and that his widow was entitled to benefits. Judge Keeley’s analysis centered on whether the decedent could reasonably have expected to die from his overmedication. She concluded that he could not, as he was trying to relieve his pain, “not to inflict any type of injury, much less to cause his own death.”
Contrast that decision with this one from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently ruled that MetLife did not act arbitrarily and capriciously in denying a claim for death benefits on the grounds that its insured’s death, which occurred while he was driving with a blood alcohol content of three times the legal limit, was not an “accident” within the meaning of its Personal Accident Insurance (PAI) policy. Lennon v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 2007 WL 2934993 (6th Cir. 2007).
In Lennon, the district court had held that even though the driver had a blood alcohol content of 0.321 (which was more than three times Michigan’s limit of .10), he “did not reasonably expect to lose his life and that his death was thus accidental.”
MetLife argued that driving in an impaired state made serious injury or death “reasonably foreseeable,” and therefore Lennon’s death was not an accident within the meaning of the PAI plan. MetLife also argued that Lennon’s impaired condition, which was caused by his voluntary consumption of alcohol, constituted intentional self-inflicted injuries under the plan, which were excluded from coverage.
Judge Rogers, writing for a majority of the panel, relied on the tort concept of gross negligence to describe Lennon’s conduct, and concluded that because, in extreme cases, a court could treat gross negligence as more of an intentional tort than simply negligence, “it is not arbitrary and capricious for an ERISA plan administrator to treat such conduct as not accidental under a policy that covers only accidents.”
Judge Clay dissented, and although his dissent is longer than the majority opinion, one sentence sums up his position: “I do not condone the pernicious effects of drunk driving, nor those who perpetrate it. But neither would I permit moralistic judgments to lull me to acquiesce in Defendant’s purported ‘interpretation’ of the PAI Policy.”
Last year, the Fourth Circuit reached the same result as Lennon in a case with facts essentially the same as Lennon’s, to wit, a drunk driver died in an accident, his beneficiary applied for accidental death benefits, and the insurance company denied the claim on the grounds that the death could reasonably be expected and thus was not accidental.
In Eckelberry v. ReliaStar life Insurance Company, 469 F.3d 340 (4th Cir. 2006), the court reversed a decision by District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin that had found in favor of the beneficiary. Judge Goodwin’s decision is well-written, and attempts to inject some humor into a case with a tragic outcome, not to make light of the situation, but to show what he regards as the absurdity of ReliaStar’s position. He pointed out that even if an insured is at fault for an accident, the insured still expects to have coverage for the accident: “Otherwise, insurers could deny almost any claim under any accident insurance policy on the grounds that the insured contributed to the resulting accident. Having accident insurance would become as useful as socks for fish.” Eckelberry v. ReliaStar Life Insurance Company, 402 F.Supp.2d 704 (S.D.W.Va. 2005).
But his reasoning did not persuade the Fourth Circuit, which reversed and found that Eckelberry’s death was not an accident (even though ReliaStar’s plan, which uses “unexpected” and “foresee[able]” in defining an accident, does not define either term).
In Eckelberry, as in Lennon, the issue of the morality of drunk driving, or of engaging in any activity that presents an increased risk of injury or death, is not directly addressed, but is inescapable. The Fourth Circuit found that, “To characterize harm flowing from such behavior [driving after had too much to drink] as merely ‘accidental’ diminishes the personal responsibility that state laws and the rules of the road require. This case, in short, affords us no basis for concluding that ReliaStar’s denial of benefits was unreasonable.”
My problem with (the Fourth Circuit’s opinion in) Eckelberry and Lennon is that ReliaStar and MetLife could have drafted their insurance policies to exclude from coverage the very conduct at issue in the appeals. But they did not, and instead chose to rely on tortured interpretations of when an outcome is expected and foreseeable in denying the claims. I realize that there is an increasingly large body of law holding to the contrary, but it seems to me that unless a driver is attempting to commit suicide by drinking too much, then driving, an injury or death that results from drunk driving is an accident and is covered under the policies at issue in these cases.
