June 17, 2019
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has found coverage for a Mississippi county for insurance policies issued decades apart for bodily injury claims suffered by three people wrongfully convicted for rape and murder. The case is Travelers Indem. Co. v. Mitchell, No. 17-60291, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 15915 (5th Cir. May 29, 2019).
The initial tragedy occurred in 1979 when Eva Patterson, 25, was raped and murdered in her own home. Her two sons watched her die. Police targeted Larry Ruffin for the crime. Other inmates were threatened with false charges unless they implicated Ruffin in Patterson's murder. After seven hours in a violent interrogation, Ruffin confessed to the crime. Sons of the victim stated that there was only one perpetrator, but as Ruffin's trial approached, police arrested two other individuals, Bobby Ray Dixon, and Phillip Bivens. Dixon and Ruffin had previously been arrested together for theft. Dixon was mentally handicapped as he had been kicked in the head by a horse as a child. After a similar interrogation to the one Ruffin suffered, Dixon also confessed to the murder and implicated Ruffin and Bivens. Similarly, Bivens was threatened with violence and death and he, too, confessed. Bivens and Dixon pleaded guilty, and Ruffin was convicted at trial. All three got life sentences. In prison, they were assaulted by other prisoners on numerous occasions. Each developed physical issues including Ruffin, infected with syphilis and herpes, and Biven, infected with Hepatitis C. They all filed post-conviction appeals asserting their innocence, but each appeal was rejected. The three innocent men spent a collective 83 years in prison. By the time DNA evidence exonerated them, Ruffin had died in prison and Dixon and Biven's illnesses killed them both not long after their release from prison.
The estates of the three wrongfully convicted men filed a civil rights lawsuit against Forrest County, which sought coverage under law enforcement liability insurance policies in effect during the imprisonment. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi decided that Travelers Indemnity Company and Scottsdale Insurance Company had to defend the county under insurance policies effective from February 2005 through February 2011 and November 1985 and November 1986 respectively.
The circuit court affirmed. First, the Fifth Circuit ruled that there was coverage under the two aforementioned policies, finding that the injuries that Bivens and Dixon had suffered between 2005 and 2011 triggered a duty to defend even though the allegedly wrongful causal acts had occurred decades earlier. The court said that their continued imprisonment alone did not trigger coverage and because the inception of the legal processes predated the Travelers policy periods by decades, its policies did not cover injuries for false arrest or imprisonment claims.
However, the Fifth Circuit reasoned that the estates alleged that Bivens and Dixon had suffered numerous harms between 2005 and 2011, and it found that if it weren't for Forrest County's wrongful acts, coerced confessions, suppressed evidence and fabricated evidence, the two would have been free men and would not have suffered the physical or mental injuries. Since the complaint alleged several distinct injuries occurring during the Travelers policy period, Travelers had a duty to defend Forrest County.
As for the Scottsdale policy, the Fifth Circuit also found coverage ruling that the policy was ambiguous on whether the injuries suffered in prison during the policy period triggered a duty to defend even though acts that were taken prior to the policy caused those injuries. The court ruled that the Travelers and Scottsdale policies provided the same coverages so Scottsdale had to defend the county too. Scottsdale's duty to defend, though, was triggered by the discrete bodily injuries that had been suffered as a result of the county's allegedly wrongful acts, not by the imprisonment.
Editors Note: In this case, the policies in question did not require the wrongful act to take place during the policy period, only the bodily injury resulting from the wrongful act had to occur during the policy period. These two policies also failed to include a "deemer clause". "Deemer clauses" define a triggering event to take place at a designated time even if the event does not only take place at that time, or even take place at that time at all, meaning that when a "deemer clause" is included, it can stipulate that all resulting injuries are deemed to have occurred at the same time as the act that caused those injuries. If a deemer clause had been in the policies, the injuries could have been stipulated to occur at the time of the initial wrongdoing, when the three men were wrongfully imprisoned. So, the insurers owed the county a duty to defend the civil rights lawsuit.