MONTGOMERY, Ala. (Legal Newsline) - Alabama’s workers’ compensation regime survived a constitutional challenge by a man who wanted to sue over his daughter’s injuries while working at a Sonic Drive In, with the Alabama Supreme Court ruling legislators had the power to take away the right to sue and replace it with a scheme providing guaranteed compensation.
Derrick Crenshaw sued Sonic Drive In of Greenville for negligence after his daughter Iyana was injured on the job but Sonic got the case dismissed under a state law providing workers’ comp as the exclusive remedy for workplace injuries. Crenshaw appealed, but the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal in an opinion by Justice Tommy Bryan.
Alabama, like other states, passed workers’ comp legislation in the early 1900s to address the problem of increasing industrial injuries. Workers had to prove their employers were to blame for accidents and frequently received no compensation. To address this problem, legislators enacted an insurance system that guaranteed payment for workplace injuries without having to prove negligence by the employer.
“In passing the Act, the legislature validly exercised its police power by eradicating or ameliorating a perceived social evil,” the court ruled.
Crenshaw argued the law was unconstitutional because it deprived workers of the right to sue under Section 13 of the Alabama Constitution, which says “all courts shall be open; and that every person, for any injury done him, in his lands, goods, person, or reputation, shall have a remedy by due process of law.”
He relied on two Alabama Supreme Court decisions handed down on the same day in 1978, striking down as unconstitutional a law that extended immunity to co-employees.
The court backtracked in a 1988 decision, Reed v. Brunson, however, upholding a 1985 amendment to the workers comp law that eliminated co-employee suits over anything but “willful conduct.”
The court noted it had previously allowed legislators to eliminate common-law suits like alienation of affection and “criminal conversation” – suing a third party for having sex with one’s spouse -- and so lawmakers were justified in ending co-employee suits because they were hurting efforts to draw industry and jobs to the state.
“The only question for the court to decide is one of power, not of expediency or wisdom,” the court said.
Justice Jay Mitchell wrote a concurrence stating the “open courts” language in the state constitution was based on the Magna Carta and intended to protect against judicial corruption, not limit the legislature’s power. Starting in the 1970s, the Alabama Supreme Court interpreted Section 13 to mean statutes that modified traditional common law remedies were “automatically suspect.”
“But I see nothing in the text or history of Article I, § 13, to suggest that it was intended to `freeze traditional common-law remedies,’” the justice wrote, citing favorably a brief by Attorney General Steve Marshall making the same point. “We should abandon the `common-law rights’ test going forward.”