TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - An absolute two-year limit on liability against the estate of a dead person doomed a lawsuit by women who were injured in an accident with a man driving a company car, the Florida Supreme Court ruled.
Rejecting complaints its reading of the law would “place a heavy burden on trial lawyers” by forcing them to investigate and file claims more quickly, the high court said a statute of repose enacted by the Florida Legislature extinguished all claims against a dead man, including against his employer.
Samantha Tsuji and Crystal Williams were injured in a 2014 accident with a car driven by Thomas E. Morton Jr. Morton was working for Lewis Bear Co. and driving a company car at the time. Tsuji and Williams sued Morton for negligence and Lewis Bear for vicarious liability in 2018, only to learn that Morton had died weeks after the accident in 2014.
The plaintiffs substituted the representative of Morton’s estate and reduced their request for damages to the limits of Morton’s insurance. LBC moved to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing Section 733.710(1) of the Florida Statutes eliminated liability for a person’s estate or representative two years after his death. Citing another Florida court decision, LBC said that since the law exonerated Morton’s estate from liability, it was exonerated from vicarious liability as well.
The plaintiffs cited Section 733.702, which carves out an exception for claims up to “the limits of casualty insurance,” which a Florida court had previously said extends the two-year limit in Section 733.710. A trial court disagreed, dismissing the case, and the First District Court of Appeal affirmed.
The Florida Supreme Court upheld that opinion in a June 29 decision. While 733.702 creates an exception to a three-month statute of limitations for claims against a dead person’s estate, nothing in that law modifies the two-year limit in 733.710, the Supreme Court ruled.
The plaintiffs argued they weren’t trying to hold Morton’s representative liable, but merely trying to collect money from his insurance policy as allowed under 733.702. They called this “pay-money” liability, as opposed to liability for breaching a duty.
That definition doesn’t fly, the Supreme Court ruled, since legislators presumably knew when they used the word “liable” that it included an obligation to pay money for someone else’s breach of duty. Legislators added the term “for damages” in other statutes, the court said, including a law protecting landlords against damages “caused by a United States flag displayed by a tenant.
Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, saying “the majority pleads for exacting specificity where none is needed.”
“It is true that there are numerous ways the statute could better say what it says,” the justice wrote. “But that notion should not be used to cloud the clear and logical conclusions of a word’s context.”