delivered the opinion of the Court.
Thе appeal is from a judgment for additional, double indemnity payable under insurance against death “as the result of bodily injury * * * through external, violent, and accidental means, * * * provided suсh death shall not result from homicide.” Death resulted from injuries received by the insured in a severe beating by robbers, and the appellant contends that as it resulted from homicide the further indemnity is not payable. The fact that a severe beating by robbers was the cause of death is not denied by the plaintiff. On the contrary, it is relied upon as bringing the death within the accident insuranсe. Its occurrence is found only from evidence on the plaintiff’s behalf. The defendant, on the other hand, has raised no question of the propriety of classing such a death as one from injury through accidental means. It has paid the ordinary, single indemnity, and has urged only that the death, on the face of the plaintiff’s evidence, resulted from homicide. This court rests the decision on that contention alone.
The trial court, applying the reasoning of some of the cases cited, refused prayers of the defendant insurer for a ruling that the evidence did not, as a matter of law, support recovery.
The evidence is that on the night of March 24th, 1934, in the neighborhood of 9 o’clock, the insured, a shoemaker in Baltimore City, coming home from his work, fell forward into a chair exclaiming, “Oh, my heart, my heart!” And he explained that two colored men had entered his shop pretending at first to have come for a pair of shoes, and then, taking him by his neck, beat him mercilessly, tore his clothes, cut out his pockets, and took his money. At home, he continued his complaints of pain *537 about the heart, clutching his chest, еven when, after two weeks, he appeared much improved and no damage wa& any longer apparent. He died on May 2nd, and physicians testified that death was in their opiniоn due to a coronary thrombosis induced by the beating on March 24.
Clauses in accident insurance policies on the causes of death have been fruitful of conflict in constructiоns. It must be by a true process of construction that the effect of a clause is ascertained; that is, either by accepting a meaning plainly appearing from the words, or, in сases of ambiguity, by choosing between two or more permissible meanings. It is not within the function of the court to impose a meaning on the contract. “A policy of insurance and evеry clause and part thereof is the contract, and, like all contracts, should be construed so as to effectuate the real purpose and intention of the parties, giving tо the language employed, when unambiguous, its ordinary and usually accepted meaning.”
Frontier Mortgage Corporation v. Heft,
Three courts in other jurisdictions have restricted the word “homicide” in similar clauses to exclude from it killings by insane persons.
Great Southern Life Ins. Co. v. Campbell,
In addition to the decisions in cases of killings by insane men, the appellee urges in support of this view that it is improbable that killings by inadvertent, innocent aсts of sane men would be within the contemplation of the clause. Decisions by other courts that exceptions, in accident insurance policies, of death by injuries intentionally infliсted, or resulting from intentional acts, contemplate this specific intent to kill, are cited for further illustration. And for the same purpose, we are referred to decisions under like clauses that shooting or throwing a missile without intent to kill any one, or to kill the one who may happen to be killed by it, does not show the specific intent required to except the death from a victim’s insurance. These cases of fatal injury without intent to kill, or to kill the actual victims, are, however, subjects of conflicting decisions, and it seems probable that the weight of authоrity is against the conclusion followed in the present argument. See review of cases in notes 48 L.R.A.(N.S.) 524, 56 A.L.R. 690, 37 L.R.A.(N.S.) 172,
An intention to kill the victim is not, of course, an essential of homicide in its ordinary and usually aсcepted meaning. There are accidental homicides, and homicides by misadventure, or involuntary manslaughter, as they are sometimes called, in which there is no intention to kill or tо harm at all.
Bouvier, Law Diet., Manslaughter;
4
Blackst. Com.
188;
Embry v. Commonwmlth,
236 Ky.
*539
204,
The principle that a legatee, who causes the death which is to bring the legacy in force, shall not take the legacy, has been applied when a legatee convicted of manslаughter had in fact no intention to kill. The court declined to sanction a distinction on that ground, in the case of
In re Hall
[1914] Prob. 1, cited in
Price v. Hitaffer,
In some of these authorities, but apparently not' in the greater number, the language of conclusive presumption is used. The intention to produce the death or other injury is said to be conclusively presumed. It has long since been made clear that a сonclusive presumption is a rule of substantive law rendering the fact irrelevant. Wigmore, Evidence, sec. 2492. And with reference to deaths caused in the commission of the greater felonies, with one of whiсh this case is concerned, the substantial reason for classing them as murders seems rather to be that the felonies are so frequently attended by deaths, that the guilty persons must be considеred as engaging in acts of a nature to threaten the deaths. 43 Yale Laiv Journal, 560; Wharton, Homicide, sec. 119.
If, then, following the first canon of construction, we take the word “homicide” in its ordinary and usually accepted meaning, the deaths by homicide, for which additional indemnity is denied under this policy, must include deaths from unlawful acts such as that of the robbers, even if that result was not intended. To construe the expression otherwise, and adopt the plaintiff’s con *541 struction, we should have to read into the clause a purpose to exclude from homicides all manslaughters, many second degree murdеrs, and many first degree murders, as in this instance. It seems to this court that we lack sufficient warrant for supposing that the clause contemplated this unusual, limited, use of the word. If it must be held that homicidеs by insane persons, or other homicides without voluntary act, are not included, which we need not decide now, it might be done by confining the exception to deaths caused by voluntary аcts, without requiring for the sake of consistency that all homicides, from manslaughter to murder in the first degree, in which death to the victims has not been intended, shall be withdrawn from the excepting clаuse. But whether that distinction could be supported or not, it is not permissible, in our opinion, to exclude by a process of construction all deaths so caused, particularly a dеath which constitutes such a highly criminal homicide as that described in this case.
The defendant’s prayers for rulings that recovery of the additional indemnity could not be had under the terms of the policy should, we think, have been granted.
Judgment reversed, without a new trial, with costs.