Annals of Compensability: A Pre-Existing Condition

August 30th, 2011 by

We first encountered Montana workers comp judge James Jeremiah Shea last year, when he ruled that Brock Hopkins, a pot-smoking handyman, was eligible for workers comp after being mauled by a bear at Great Bear Adventures. In his ruling, Judge Shea managed to invoke the movie, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, to wit:

“It is not as if this attack occurred when Hopkins inexplicably wandered into the grizzly pen while searching for the nearest White Castle. Hopkins was attacked while performing a job Kilpatrick had paid him to do – feeding grizzly bears.”

In a more recent case, Judge Shea was confronted with the claim of Bruce Martin, a carpenter seeking treatment for what he insisted was a work-related back problem. While there is no reason to believe that Martin was partaking of Brock Hopkins’s favorite recreational drug, he did manage to present a narrative that consistently conflicted with the perceptions of virtually everyone else involved: his employer, Jesse Chase, co-worker Barry Hollander, and claims adjuster Michele Fairclough.
Martin claimed he injured his back while stripping the plastic protective barrier off of metal siding – a relatively light-duty task. But in walking off the job that morning, he stated to his boss that his sciatica was acting up and that it was not work related. Only after going to an Urgent Care clinic did he claim that the injury happened at work. Why? We can assume that he wanted his employer to pick up the tab through workers comp.
My Aching Back
Martin’s history of back problems began in the early 1990s, following a motor vehicle accident. He treated sporadically with Dr. Aumann, a chiropractor. Dr. Aumann, sympathetic to his long-term patient, thought that “on a more- probable-than-not” basis that Martin’s injury was the result of the work accident he described. Unfortunately for Martin, no one else bought his story, even as the story itself changed over time.
Judge Shea wrote:

Dr. Aumann identified objective medical findings to support Martin’s claim of lumbar spine problems. However, Martin has not established that this injury occurred because of a specific event on a single day or during a single shift. I did not find Martin’s testimony credible. Neither Hollander, who was working alongside Martin, nor Martin’s employer Chase could corroborate Martin’s account of injuring his back on June 29, 2010…

It is not altogether impossible to feel a little sympathy for Martin: he has a real back problem. He is experiencing legitimate pain. He has difficulty performing physical work and is not trained to do anything else. He desperately needs income. Martin is like a lot of other American workers in these troubled times, living day-to-day on the edge of disaster. While we can understand why he would try to stretch the facts to fit the workers comp mold, we acknowledge that he was wrong to do it. As Judge Shea concluded, Martin was not injured as the result of an industrial accident. Given that definitive ruling, Martin, bad back and all, is simply on his own.

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