Baltimore Car Foundry Co. v. Ruzicka

Ureter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Upon this appeal from a judgment of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County, affirming an order of the State Industrial Accident Commission, the main question to be decided is whether the death of Frank J. Buzieka, to whose widow an award was made by the Commission under the Workmen’s Compensation Law, was the result of his “willful misconduct” within the meaning of that statute, which by its 46th section provides that “no employee or dependent of any employee shall be entitled to receive any compensation or benefit under this Act, on account of any injury to or death of an employee caused by self-inflicted injury, willful misconduct, or where the injury or death resulted solely from the intoxication of the injured employee.” Buzieka was crushed and killed while attempting to pass between two cars on a track in the car-erecting shop of the Baltimore Car Foundry Company in which he was employed as a maker of decks or platforms for the cars there in course of construction. The accident occurred in the evening as the day’s work was closing’ and Buzieka was starting to leave the shop on his way to his home. The cars between which he tried to pass were two of a number of finished ears, stand ⁴⁹³ ing at intervals on the track, and ready to he coupled together and drawn out of the shop by an engine which had boon brought to the end of the building for that purpose.

A trainman bad passed along the track notifying all tbe workmen that tbe cars were about to' he coupled and moved. At a distance of about eighty feet from the place where Euzicka had been working there was a boardwalk over the track referred to, and others parallel with it, which was intended for the use of the workmen in crossing the tracks in going to and from their work. There does not appear to have been any enforced rule requiring the employees to“ use the boardwalk alone in passing from one side of the building to' the other, and they could, if they chose, in going home, cross the tracks at other points. When the trainman who gave warning as to the coupling and removal of the' cars passed Euzicka’s place of work, the latter was in the act of putting on his coat.

It was about five minutes later that the engine, on signal from the trainman, began the movement by which the cars were coupled. An employee who saw the accident testified that he told Euzicka, as he was about to go between the cars, that be ought not to do so because they were ready to he moved, but Euzicka said: “That is all right; I will go through before they start.” If he had passed on promptly, he would have crossed in safety, as the cars were not moved during the next five minutes, but as be reached tbe track he was engaged in conversation by another workman for about the period just mentioned, and then as he was passing between tbe couplers, which were three or four feet apart, the movement of the cars was begun and be was crushed to death. It is, of course, perfectly clear that tbe fatal accident we have described was the result of Euzicka’s own negligence. Eut we agree with the Court below and the State Industrial Accident Commission in the opinion that the highly imprudent act which caused the unfortunate man’s death is not properly to he characterized as willful misconduct.

It lacked the element of intentional impropriety which those words ⁴⁹⁴ imply. It was a thoughtless and' heedless act, but not a willful breach of a positive rule of conduct or duty. In Bradbury’s Workmen’s Compensation Law, 3rd ed., p. 531, where numerous decisions on the subject are collected and discussed, it is said: “No general rule of law can be established defining accurately what constitutes willful misconduct. The question is one of fact and must be determined by the facts presented in each particular case.

The conduct must be willful, which means that it must be intentional, that is, deliberate, with an exercise of the- will as opposed to accident, negligence, inadvertence, and thoughtless acts on the spur of the”moment or an error of judgment.”’ On the appeal to the House of Lords in Johnson v. Marshall Sons & Co., 94 L. T. 828, Loed Oiiaítcellor Lore-burg, in defining “serious and willful misconduct,” as used in the British Workmen’s Compensation Act, said that the word