161 A. 276 | Md. | 1932
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, ch. 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 OilCompany v. Mealey,
The proceedings in court must, of course, conform to the special nature 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 discarding the provision of the Legislature in section 10, and surrendering the freedom given by it. But still we think that some discrimination is required and intended when a jury is asked to determine the facts, and some hearsay might have to be excluded from their consideration as unworthy of reliance as a basis of adjudication. Standard Oil Co. v. Mealey, supra. There is novelty now in discriminating between some hearsay and other hearsay, or any other kind of evidence, all of which is excluded by the strict common law rules, but, of course, it is not an entirely new process. The familiar exceptions to those rules have grown up from similar discriminations. And in the old special proceeding in Maryland on petitions for freedom of slaves, which was one of the most familiar of our civil proceedings prior to 1863, hearsay covering an extraordinary range of facts was commonly received out of necessity and custom, but the courts stopped at receiving such hearsay as neighborhood reputation on the ultimate question in controversy, whether the petitioner was a slave or free. See, for instance, Shorter v. Boswell, 2 H.
J. 359; Walls v. Hemsley, 4 H. J. 243; and Queen v.Hepburn, 7 Cranch, 290, 3 L.Ed. 348 (Duvall, J., dissenting);Roberts v. Consumers' Can Co.,
We see nothing in the hearsay evidence in the present record which would have required its exclusion from the jury. There is little more in it than was given in testimony of eyewitnesses produced before the commission. They testified from their own observation that the man stopped while at work and reclined up against the rock he was handling, *54 and complained of a hurt, that a new hernia appeared upon examination soon after, and that this hernia indirectly brought about his death. There was some repetition of this testimony in the hearsay evidence, and, because of the repetition, it might be objected that there was no necessity for receiving the facts at second hand, too, but in this case the result seems unimportant. The remaining part of the hearsay, consisting in the reported statements of Chisholm that the rock had slipped as he was moving it, or that his foot slipped, and that the pain of the injury came with that happening, seems to us not to be so unsafe and unreliable as a basis for the adjudication that the jury should not have been permitted to consider it. Here, as in the Mealey case, supra, the statements repeated referred to a single fact, and a simple occurrence, and would seem to have left little danger of misunderstanding or mistake in reproducing them. There is, of course, danger of falsity in thus reproducing statements, but hardly any greater danger than there is of falsity in the testimony of eyewitnesses.
The legal sufficiency of the evidence to establish the fact of an accident causing the injury is the subject of the second question raised. There was clearly sufficient evidence to support a finding that the injury arose out of and in the course of the work, but a further finding of an accident is required to bring the injury within the class of those compensable under the act.Slacum v. Jolley,
Judgment affirmed, with costs.
OFFUTT and DIGGES, JJ., concur in the result. *56