Waddell George's Creek Coal Co. v. Chisholm

Bond, C. J. delivered the opinion of the Court. The case is one under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, Code, art. 101, as amended, and the principal questions raised for consideration on review here are two, one, of the propriety of receiving and considering in the circuit court on appeal hearsay evidence given before the State Industrial Accident Commission on the cause of injury, and the other, of the legal sufficiency of the evidence, with or without the hearsay, to' show that there had been an accident causing the injury, arising out of and in the course of the employment and ultimately causing death. The commission disallowed the claim of the widow of the workman, and, on appeal to the circuit court, in which the questions of fact were referred to a jury, that action was reversed. The appeal of the employer and insurer to this court has followed.

Abram Chisholm, husband of the claimant, on April 15th, 1931, while at work in the coal mine of the Waddell George’s Creek Company, moving a rock which had dropped in the way of the coal he was to mine, stopped and leaned over against the rock, and, when another workman nearby reached him a few seconds later, complained of a burning, stinging ⁵¹ pain in the region of the groin, received while trying to move the rock. There is evidence that examination disclosed a new hernia, of a nature to require an operation for correction. The operation was performed, and the man shortly afterwards died from an embolism and septic pneumonia; and the operating surgeon testified that this resulted unavoidably from the operation, which, in turn, had been necessitated by the hernia. Evidence was offered and received by the commission that, after stopping work, Chisholm had stated to' several others merely that he had sustained the injury while moving the rock, which is estimated to have weighed about a hundred pounds.

But the widow and one companion of the deceased testified that he had stated further that his foot had slipped, or that the rock had slipped, and that the pain had struck him immediately. While the testimony is not so explicit, it seems inferable that these latter witnesses meant to attribute to him an explanation that the rupture came with and from the slipping. There was other testimony that the man had described his trouble only as a sick stomach. The testimony was, as stated, all taken before the commission, and on appeal below the case was reviewed upon the record of the commission’s proceedings in accordance with the provisions of the Act of 1931, ch. 406, which confined the court and jury to that record.

And the hearsay statements outlined were read to the jury from the record and considered by them, against objection made, and several exceptions to the rulings permitting this. The question of permitting hearsay to be read to a jury in these cases must now, of course, be decided upon the altered basis resulting from the Act of 1931, eh. 406, confining the review to the commission’s record. By the express provision in section 10 of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, Code, art. 101, the commission is not bound by the usual common law or statutory rules of evidence, but may make its investigation in such manner as in its judgment is best calculated to ascertain the substantial rights of the parties and to carry out justly the spirit of the act. The record of its ⁵² proceedings in any case may therefore contain a report of hearsay evidence properly received and considered by them.

Standard Oil Company v. Mealey, 147 Md. 249, 255 , 127 A. 850 . And now the section of the act relating to appeals, or more exactly, “proceedings in the nature of appeals,” section 56, as amended and re-enacted by the Act of 1931, ch. 406, places upon the court the duty of determining from the record (in the absence of any stipulation of facts) whether the commission has exceeded its powers, and “whether it has misconstrued the law and facts applicable in the case decided as disclosed by” that record. “If the court shall determine that the Commission has acted within its powers and has correctly construed the law and facts, the decision of the Commission shall be confirmed; otherwise it shall be reversed or modified.” And, upon application of the parties, questions of fact may be referred to a jury, but still to be answered from the commission’s record. Thomas v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 162 Md. 509 , 160 A. 793 . It is urged that this specification of function for the court in workmen’s compensation proceedings, this confinement to determining from the record whether the commission has misconstrued the law and facts, authorizes no rejection by the court of any of the evidence found in the record.

But it has been the long-established view at common law that jury trials require some discrimination and selection in the evidence to be submitted to the jury as the basis for its findings (1 Wigmore, Evidence [2nd Ed.], secs. 4, 4a, and 4b), and it seems to us we must suppose the Legislature to have contemplated that, in proceedings with a jury under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, too) so far as might be consistent with the special, peculiar nature of those proceedings, and with the other provisions of the act, such customary discrimination and selection should be practised when a jury is resorted to for a decision on the facts. The proceedings in court must, of course, conform to the special náture of the litigation, and the provisions of the act, and the court could not consistently import all the rules for exclusion of evidence in the more familiar common law ⁵³ proceedings before it, and reject or disregard any of the commission’s evidence which did not conform to those rules. The proceedings at the start are not required to conform to those rules, and, as was observed in Standard Oil Co. v. Mealey, supra, application in the courts of a set of tests for the evidence differing from those permitted to the commission would make it impracticable for the commission to work effectively without