Di Pietro v. Mayor and City Council

Sloan, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. This case comes up on appeal from an order of the Baltimore City Court dismissing the appeal of Anna Di ²²¹ Pietro from an order of the Industrial Accident Commission dismissing her claim for compensation as the widow of Louis Di Pietro. The case was heard in the City Court on the petition of the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, employer, and the answer of the appellant. The petition of the City said that on December 24th, 1937, the Industrial Accident Commission, after hearing, disallowed the claim of Louis D. Pietro, and ruled that he had not sustained an accidental personal injury arising out of and in the course of his employment with the Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, and that he was suffering from a disease or sickness on October 13th, 1937, not connected with or resulting from his employment by the City; that on an appeal by Louis Di Pietro, the order of the Accident Commission was affirmed on March 7th, 1939; that an appeal was taken to the Court of Appeals on April 28th, 1939, was not prosecuted and was abandoned, and thereby the judgment of the Baltimore City Court became a complete and final adjudication binding upon Louis Di Pietro and those claiming by, through, or under him; that the claim of the appellant, Anna Di Pietro, widow, is based on the same accident for which her husband (now deceased) claimed compensation for injury.

The appellant’s answer was that the evidence at the hearing before the Accident Commission was that the claimant Louis Di Pietro, was suffering from gastric ulcers, whereas an operation performed May 12th, 1939, showed that he had what is commonly called a blood tumor, and that the causal connection between the alleged accident and a blood tumor could have been shown by the testimony of a fellow employee who did not testify at the hearing of the original claim when Louis Di Pietro was living and present. The appellant cites but one case, that is Sea Gull Specialty Co. v. Snyder, 151 Md. 78 , 134 A. 133 , but it is not this case. There the employee had been awarded compensation. He died, and his widow made claim for ²²² full death benefits.

The question there was, whether the employer was entitled to credit against the death benefits for the compensation paid the employee in his lifetime, and the decision was that the widow was entitled to full compensation without any deductions. Here the appellant asks us to apply to this case certain expressions in the opinion in the Sea Gull case. Those expressions cannot be dislocated from their connection with the question involved and being decided and from the opinion as a whole. The appellant quotes and italicizes the sentence: “Compensation in the second of these classes (death claims) is in no wise made dependent upon compensation having been already awarded to the injured party.” But this is followed by a sentence, all quoted by the appellant, in which this appears, “The Industrial Accident Commission, before an award of compensation is made to such