Maine Court Holds That Emotional Distress Claims Trigger Additional BI Limits
Thank goodness that Maine is a relatively small state, as its Law Court seems to have a boundless appetite for finding insurance coverage.
In the latest defeat for insurers, the court ruled in Ryder v. USAA General Indemnity Co., 2007 ME 146 (Me. December 6, 2007) that an auto insurer must pay an additional $50,000 "per person" UIM limit for the emotional distress that various family members suffered when the insured was struck and killed by another car as she got out of the insured vehicle. The trial court had ruled that USAA owed only a single $50,000 limit, as the emotional distress claims were not a separate "bodily injury." On appeal, however, the Law Court concluded that the USAA definition of "bodily injury" ("bodily harm, sickness, disease or death") was ambiguous. The court held that the general rule that an adjective modified not only the noun next to it but all other nouns in the same sequence did not apply here, since there is no such thing as a "bodily death" (the justices plainly had no familiarity with flying on U.S.. Airways). As a result, the court ruled that emotional distress is a "sickness" or "disease" and required the insurer to pay three additional limits for the by-standards claims.
The court's ruling highlights the significance of small variations in policy language. The court made much of the fact that the USAA policy was different from the conventional ISO wordings (ie. "bodily injury, sickness or disease, including death resulting at any time therefrom). Also, USAA's position in this case was not aided by the fact that the tortfeasor's policy with Northern Progressive contained an unusual definition of "bodily injury" that explicitly made by-standers claims subject to the limit of coverage available for bodily injury claims.
