In its recent opinion in Daher v Prime Healthcare Servs-Garden City, LLC, ___ Mich ___; ___ NW3d ___ (2024) (Docket No. 165377), the Michigan Supreme Court revisited the issue of damages for lost earnings in wrongful death cases.
In the opinion, the Supreme Court examined 175 years’ worth of statutory and judicial history surrounding the Michigan wrongful death act (WDA) and its predecessors to conclude that damages for a decedent’s lost future earnings are not recoverable under the WDA.
Damages under the WDA are set forth in MCL 600.2922(6), which provides that “[i]n every action under this section, the court or jury may award damages as the court or jury shall consider fair and equitable, under all the circumstances including…”:
“[R]easonable medical, hospital, funeral, and burial expenses for which the estate is liable;”
“[R]easonable compensation for the pain and suffering, while conscious, undergone by the deceased during the period intervening between the time of the injury and death; and”
“[D]amages for the loss of financial support and the loss of the society and companionship of the deceased.”
While a decedent’s beneficiary may recover loss of the decedent’s earnings as financial support, as specifically noted in the statute, the Supreme Court in Daher found that the statue cannot likewise be read to provide for other lost future earnings, thereby overruling prior precedent set by the Court of Appeals.
Daher is not, however, the first case in which the Supreme Court has reached this conclusion. In 1948, the Court held the same thing – that lost earnings are not allowable under the WDA – when analyzing a prior version of the statute, in Baker v Slack, 319 Mich 703 (1948).
Several years ago, however, in Denney v Kent Co Rd Comm, 317 Mich App 727 (2016), the Court of Appeals, without addressing Baker, held that under the current WDA, such damages are allowed.
Thus, when the Daher case came to the Court of Appeals in 2022, the Court, bound to follow its prior holding in Denney, reached the same conclusion. In doing so, the Court of Appeals this time acknowledged the Supreme Court’s 1948 Baker opinion but concluded that Baker was “no longer ‘good law’”, having been superseded by the Legislature’s changes to the language of the WDA over time. Daher v Prime Healthcare Servs-Garden City, LLC, 344 Mich App 522, 530; 1 NW3d 405 (2022).
Reviewing the Court of Appeals’ decision, the Daher Court criticized the statutory analysis employed by the Court of Appeals in Denney. Similarly, the Court analyzed the statutory changes to MCL 600.2922(6) over time and concluded that these changes could not be interpreted as superseding its prior Baker opinion.
In its analysis, the Supreme Court considered the history of the statutory text by viewing its more recent amendments (in 1971 and 1985) in the context of the statute’s original form as enacted in 1939. The Court also considered the statute’s predecessors, including Michigan’s 1838 survival act and 1848 death act, as well as, before that, the common law. Based on this contextual analysis, it was plain to the Daher Court that if the Legislature had intended to create a category of wrongful death damages that included future earnings, it would have expressly done so. Because it did not, it would be improper to read such a category of damages into the statute, and the Court of Appeals’ holdings to the contrary in Denney and related earlier cases were improper.
The Daher case is impactful because it places a substantial limitation on wrongful death damages. In addition, the Supreme Court’s opinion has implications outside the wrongful death context because it highlights the Court’s mission, in interpreting a statute, to defer to the Legislature’s intent based not only on what the Legislature includes in a statute, but also on what it leaves out. While the Supreme Court will not necessarily look to outside sources to make this determination when the statutory language is clear, it will, as the Daher opinion demonstrates, consider the evolution of the statutory language itself over time in evaluating whether its understanding of the statute’s meaning is correct.