ANNAPOLIS, Md. (Legal Newsline) - A mother who won a $500,000 jury award for household services she said she expected to receive from her deceased daughter failed to prove she could reasonably expect the help, the Maryland's highest court has ruled, upholding an appeals court denial of pecuniary damages in a wrongful death case.
Lolita Fowlkes sued Dr. Shabbir Choudry over the death of her adult daughter, Yenita Owens, who died after allegedly negligent medical care. A Baltimore jury awarded her $1 million, including $500,000 for the loss of future benefits she expected from Owens, who she testified lived with her and provided various services including washing the dishes and driving her on errands in a car borrowed from her cousin.
When asked if she expected to receive such help for the rest of her life, Fowlkes testified: “If I could live with her forever, then I was going to live with her forever.”
An intermediate appeals court reversed the award of pecuniary damages, citing the lack of evidence Owens had any legal duty to provide help or had made a promise to do so. The Maryland Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in a decision that delved deep into the history of wrongful death actions in Maryland and England.
Maryland’s wrongful death statute was passed in 1852, modeled upon England’s Fatal Accidents Act of 1846. Both allowed plaintiffs to recover pecuniary benefits, or compensation for the services they reasonably expected to receive from the deceased relative. Because the exchange of services was among close relatives, courts didn’t require plaintiffs to prove they had a legal or contractual right to them. In a string of 19th century cases in the U.S. and U.K. mostly involving the railroad accidents, courts required plaintiffs to prove only that they had a reasonable expectation of financial assistance or services from the deceased.
“Rather than go down the `rabbit hole’ of trying to reconcile the various `reasonable expectation’ standards, we need only look at the English antecedents and our case law to interpret `reasonable expectations of pecuniary benefits’ as well as cases from other states with similar wrongful death statutes,” Judge Lynne Battaglia wrote.
Some proof more than mere assumptions is required, the court noted, citing the unsympathetic words of a Maryland judge in 1866:
“According to the appellant’s theory, the mother and son are supposed to live on together to an indefinite age; the one craving sympathy and support, the other rendering reverence, obedience and protection. Such pictures of filial piety are inestimable moral examples, beautiful to contemplate, but the law has no standard by which to measure their loss.”
The reasonable expectation must be “anchored” by some proof the adult child intended to continue providing care, the Court of Appeals ruled, whether that is a written agreement or merely a verbal promise. It can also be shown by overt acts, such as an adult child leaving her home and moving with an ailing parent.
In this case, the court concluded, the plaintiff didn’t provide any proof her daughter was legally compelled to help her out, or any verbal promise beyond testimony the daughter was “in the habit” of providing services to her mother.
To permit a pecuniary damage award based solely on evidence of a symbiotic relationship of mother and daughter in the present case would be to allow a jury to engage in `speculation’ about Ms. Owens’s intent,” the court ruled. “To the extent that Ms. Fowlkes argues that proof of a deceased adult child’s intent would be hard to come by, we disagree, as we have not seen that as an impediment in our review of the cases.”