Patapsco & Back Rivers Railroad v. Davis

Henderson, J., filed the following dissenting opinion. In all of the compensation cases heretofore decided by this Court, in which a claimant has successfully avoided the bar of limitations by invoking the estoppel clause of the Compensation Act, there has been an affirmative representation on the part of the employer, reasonably calculated to mislead the claimant into thinking that a claim for compensation would be filed for him. I cannot find any evidence of such a representation in the instant case. It is true that there is no explanation as to just why the plant doctor filled out a certificate of disability describing a non-accidental injury, when the original report referred to an accident.

Presumably the doctor’s statement was based on what the claimant told him. There were, of course, two mutually exclusive funds established by the employer against which claims might be made, depending upon the nature of the injury, and it may be that the illiterate claimant did not know the difference. But in any event at the time of the conference on November 9, 1950, of which a stenographic transcript was taken, the claimant had received a letter from the Railroad Retirement Board stating, in effect, that if he were receiving workmen’s compensation he was ineligible for Railroad Retirement benefits, and a letter from the State ¹⁶¹ Industrial Accident Commission stating that no compensation claim had been filed on his behalf, and enclosing a form to be used if he intended to claim compensation. At the conference, the claimant denied that he had told the Retirement Board he was getting workmen’s compensation on account of his present injury.

In effect, he agreed