SANTA ANA, Calif. (Legal Newsline) - A California appeals court has deep-sixed a Hawaii woman’s attempt to sue a movie production company over injuries her father suffered while diving in French Polynesia, saying maritime law doesn’t allow her to collect money for loss of consortium or punitive damages.
In a 12-page opinion that begins with a reference to `Moby Dick’ author Herman Melville, Judge Willam Bedsworth wrote that the long history of U.S. maritime law sets it apart from other types of civil law, including the availability of certain types of damages for certain plaintiffs.
The injured diver Michael Prickett and his wife also sued Bonnier Corp. in California state court under the federal Jones Act, which provides specific remedies for merchant seamen. They settled that case for $7.8 million.
Their daughter Mira Chloe wasn’t so lucky. The first judge to hear her case allowed it to proceed, rejecting arguments from Bonnier that the damages she was claiming weren’t available under general maritime law. (Maritime law applied because the filming accident occurred in navigable waters and involved activities traditionally associated with maritime trade. Unlike her father, Mira Prickett claimed her father wasn’t a merchant seaman covered by the Jones Act, however.)
After the first judge ruled, Mira Prickett’s case was transferred to a new judge. In the meantime, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Dutra Group v. Batterton in June 2019, reversing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and ruling punitive damages weren’t available under maritime law in a lawsuit claiming a vessel was unseaworthy. The new judge cited that decision to dismiss the daughter’s claims.
The daughter appealed on several grounds, including that the recent Supreme Court decision didn’t apply to the facts in this case. She said her father was a non-seaman (ignoring his claim in his own lawsuit) and he wasn’t suing over an unseaworthy ship.
The appeals court rejected those arguments, tracing the convoluted history of maritime law in the process. Until the 20th century, judges saw themselves as the protectors of seamen, who a Massachusetts court described in an 1836 as possessing “indifference to the future, credulity, which is easily won, and confidence, which is readily surprised.” Judges made the law and Congress largely stayed out of the picture.
Punitive damages had long been available in cases of “maintenance and cure,” in which ship captains had a duty to feed and house injured sailors aboard ship, instead of dumping them helpless at the nearest port. But punitive damages weren’t available in other types of maritime suits.
Congress began writing maritime law into the statute books with the Jones Act in 1920, which doesn’t allow punitive damages or loss of consortium claims. Even though the daughter wasn’t suing under the Jones Act, the judge wrote, the general principles applied. Citing another Ninth Circuit decision also involving an accident in French Polynesia (“It is worth pondering how the law in this area might have developed if French Polynesia were not so attractive,” the judge mused in a footnote) he said he wasn’t going to “recognize an entitlement to a remedy where none previously existed.”
The judge ended by observing it would be unfair to deny damages to “the families of those who go down to the sea in ships for their living – those whose miserable lives, hazardous and unpredictable occupation, and improvident ways formerly evoked a `special solicitude’ from the courts – while allowing families of non-seamen to recover those damages.”
“The United States Supreme Court has cautioned us not to get ahead of Congress in defining new maritime remedies, and we will abide by this admonition,” he concluded.