Sexual Molestation Exclusion Held to Preclude Coverage For Negligent Supervision Claims

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Mike Aylward

Over the years, insurers and tort lawyers have engaged in a cold war over whether homeowner's policies should cover intentional or criminal acts.   In the face of threshold contentions that such offenses were not "accidents" or "occurrences," plaintiffs learned to plead their claims under theories of neglligent hiring or supervision in the hopes of creating coverage.  Enough courts have come to accept coverage for these "negligence" theories that insurers have added new exclusions specifically directed at certain types of offenses that give rise to them, notably assault and battery and sexual molestation.

In the latest skirmish over these new wordings, the Supreme Court of New Hampshire (which has been very busy lately on the coverage front) ruled last week in Philbrick v. Liberty Mutual Ins. Co. that a trial court erred in refusing to apply a homeowner's exclusion for "bodily injury...arising out of sexual molestation" to negligent supervision claims against the parents of a teenage baby-sitter who had molested the plaintiff's children.  The court rejected the plaintiffs' argument that it was the parents' negligence that cause their injuries, holding instead that all of these claims clearly arose out of excluded molestation since, but for the molestation, there would not have been any claim of negligent supervision against the parents.  Writing for the court, Justice Duggan declared that "where, as here, the language of the exclusion explicitly ties the exclusion to the nature of the injury, the analysis should be directed towards the injuries suffered rather than the causes of action in the complaint."

The tragic nature of the njuries in cases of this sort place great moral pressure on courts to contort insurance policies to provide funds where none may otherwise exist to compensate the victims of criminal acts.  Increasingly, however, courts are resisting pressure to find coverage for "negligent" crimes and are looking beyond the headings in a plaintiff's complaint to determine whether the facts warrant coverage or not.
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New Hampshire Supreme Court Adopts Pro Rata Allocation For Long Tail Claims

Posted on October 18, 2007 by Mike Aylward

Score it Insurers 8-Policyholders 6 as casualty insurers won a round today in the on-going battle over whether insureds must allocate long-tail losses in accordance with the duration of the loss or can "spike" their claims to a single year of coverage to trigger higher layer policies and avoid those nasty orphan shares and gaps in coverage.

The insurers' latest win came this morning in the New Hampshire Supreme Court.  On a certified question from the U.S. District Court, the court held in EnergyNorth Natural Gas, Inc. v. Certain Underwriters that indemnity claims arising out of the clean up of the insured's former gas site cannot be spiked in a single year to trigger a third layer excess policy issued by American Re in 1972.  Having adopted a "continuous trigger" 3 years ago in another EnergyNorth MGP case, the court this time held that the insured must bear the consequences of this extended period of property damage, as insurers are only responsible for that portion of the loss corresponding to the duration of their coverage. 

In a lengthy (for this court) opinion, the court concluded that pro rata allocation was (1) more consistent with its trigger of coverage analysis than "joint and several" liability; (2) gives insured's incentives to buy insurance and avoid environmental carelessness and (3) that joint and several is based on an untenable assumption, namely that at every point in a progressive, developing loss, the injury will be substantially the same.  Further, the court found that joint and several didn't resolve the issue of allocation, it merely postponed it by spawning another round of contribution litigation between the spiked carrier and other potentially triggered insurers that had avoided the insured's initial embrace.  

As any means of allocation spread the risk too thinly to reach AmRe's layer, the New Hampshire court (much like the NY Court of Appeals in ConEd) chose not to be much more specific about the details of allocation, although it expressed a strong preference for the "years times limit" approach pioneered by the New Jersey Supreme Court in Owens-Illinois.  Should that approach prove unfeasible, however, the court opined that lower courts should feel free to pro rate by years.

Owing to the fact that three justices were conflicted, only Justices Dalianis and Duggan (who wrote the opinion) sat, with the assistance of retired Justice Sherman Horton.  Fans of NHSC history will recall that it was Sherm Horton who, shortly before retiring, handed gas utilities their first appellate defeat by ruling in Concord Gas that the intentional discharge of tar waste into a body of water could not be an "occurrence."   How the wheel turns...

As is the case with many similar opinions, there are a host of details that remain to be worked out.  Notably, the court did not specify what denominator should be used.  Insofar as the court sought to align its trigger and allocation analyses, it would seem that this period should run from the date that the site was placed in operation (1852--which was the year that Franklin Pierce--New Hampshire's native son--became President of the United States).  The court's reference to OI suggests, however, that this period must take into account the amount of insurance a reasonable business would have bought and thus the question of whether insurance could have been purchased for casualty risks for some of that time.

While the court's statement that loss continued through manifestation implied that the denominator should extend until 2000, when this pollution was first documented, the Court's reference to OI again raises the possibility that later years containing pollution exclusions should be cut off, as policyholders in Minnesota have argument since Wooddale.
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