Conservative shouldn’t be synonymous with cruelty. But that’s how it seems at Florida’s First District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee.
That’s bad news for injured workers. All compensation appeals go there.
What the court did this month to Stephen Sargent is as cruel as cruel could get.
He was a correctional officer for the Bradford County sheriff. He began as a part-timer in May 2012 and transitioned to full-time work a year later.
In January 2020, he had a heart attack. Florida law presumes that’s a work-related injury for correctional and law enforcement officers and firefighters, among others, because they have very stressful jobs. They’re as entitled to worker’s compensation benefits for heart trouble as for any other workplace injury.
Sargent was denied the health care and lost wage benefits he applied for.
Ruling against him and in favor of the sheriff’s office and its insurer, the Florida League of Cities, a compensation judge invoked a diabolical Catch-22.
Sargent hadn’t had a second physical examination after switching to full-time work.
Never mind that he had passed the one he took before going to work part time in 2012 — ”the only one BCSO ever required,” according to the dissent in his appeal.
The dissent, by Judge Scott Makar, is the only clue as to why the two other judges on the panel, Ross Bilbrey and Susan Kelsey, ruled against Sargent’s appeal. They didn’t bother to explain it, leaving nothing for Sargent to take to the Supreme Court. All three were appointed by former Gov. Rick Scott.
The applicable state law, Makar explained, forbids reliance on a prior physical exam “only when a correctional officer goes from a previous employer to a different employer,” not when one is promoted to a full-time job within the same agency.
Moreover, he noted, the sheriff’s office not only failed to require a second one but “affirmatively disavowed” the necessity when any part-time officer was promoted to full-time status.
Makar quoted testimony from the office that “we didn’t do a second physical because they’d been there with us, they’d been observed, they passed their first drug test. We knew they were widely capable … ”
In light of that policy, it is unconscionable that the sheriff’s office and its insurer held Sargent responsible for not having had a second physical.
We asked James Spears, his lawyer, what that has meant for Sargent.
“He’s lost tens of thousands of dollars in compensation that would be due under the law,” Spears replied in an e-mail. “He has lost lifetime medical care with a cardiologist for his heart disease, along with medications.
“He stopped working for the sheriff’s office last year due to the stress this has caused him as well as the way he has been treated. … This cost him income and benefits and pension, as he has not found a job earning the same salary or benefits …
“He feels duped and let down by the sheriff’s office and is worried for the others that this will affect in the future.”
Others should worry too. This isn’t the first time that court has gone to extremes to deny coverage under the worker’s compensation law. Its tendency to do that is welcome news for employer lobbies both private and public.
In November 2019, it turned away claims involving two workers who had contracted diseases that their doctors said were almost certainly caused by mold exposure at work. One had already died when the court got the case.
Those rulings made it practically impossible for anyone ever to win a toxic mold case. Among other things, the court said they would have to prove that the concentrations were enough to cause harm and that they had not been exposed elsewhere. In both cases, the best evidence — the mold itself — had already been cleaned up when the workers became ill.
By extension, those cases also created a very high bar to successful claims for COVID-19 exposure.
In those cases and Sargent’s, the decisions turned on laws that the Legislature could and should correct. But you would have to go back a very long time for any occasion when Florida’s lobbyist-ridden Legislature did anything with the worker’s compensation law other than to make it less fair for wage-earners and more comfortable for their employers.
____
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
