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Allstate Indemnity Co. v. Wise5/30/2001
Appeal from the Circuit Court for Pinellas County; Thomas E. Penick, Judge.
Allstate Indemnity Company complains of the circuit court's refusal to declare that the appellees' injury claims were excluded from coverage under an automobile liability policy issued by Allstate. We affirm.
Allstate's insured, Lesley Armstrong, led a state trooper on a bizarre automobile chase that began when the trooper tried to apprehend Armstrong on a theft charge. In the end, Armstrong was charged with fleeing and eluding a law enforcement officer, reckless driving and running a stop sign. During the episode Armstrong was involved in two motor vehicle accidents. In the first, she lost control of her automobile when she applied her brakes at a crowded intersection. She struck a truck in which John Jablon and Cathy Burkholder were riding. Armstrong managed to drive away from the accident scene, still in flight from the state trooper. As the chase continued, she ran a stop sign and struck a car driven by Van Brown.
Jablon, Burkholder and Brown asserted claims under the bodily injury liability portion of Armstrong's automobile insurance policy. In response, Allstate sued for a declaratory judgment that the claims were not covered by virtue of a policy exclusion for intentional acts. That language reads:
ALLSTATE will not pay for any damages an insured person is legally obligated to pay because of:
9. Bodily injury or property damage which may reasonably be expected to result from the intentional or criminal acts of an insured person or which are in fact intended by an insured person.
Following a bench trial, the circuit court found that although Armstrong was intentionally fleeing from the state trooper when the first accident occurred, there was no evidence that she intentionally drove her vehicle into the truck occupied by Jablon and Burkholder. Similarly, the court determined that there was no evidence that Armstrong intended to collide with Brown when she ran the stop sign. Citing the Florida Supreme Court's decision in Prudential Property & Casualty Insurance Co. v. Swindal, 622 So. 2d 467 (Fla. 1993), the court held that under this subjective test the policy exclusion did not apply. It rendered judgment against Allstate.
In Swindal, our supreme court reaffirmed that Florida law requires both an intent to act and a specific intent to injure in order to bring a loss within the ambit of an intentional act coverage exclusion. There, the intentional act of pointing a gun at the victim coupled with the intent to injure would trigger the exclusion clause. But liability coverage would lie if the factfinder concluded that the shooter's act was "accidental," i.e., that he lacked the intent to injure. The court declared that neither Landis v. Allstate Insurance Co., 546 So. 2d 1051 (Fla. 1989), nor State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. v. Marshall, 554 So. 2d 504 (Fla. 1989), had changed the law. In Landis, the court held that an intentional injury exclusion clause excluded coverage for injuries suffered by children who were sexually molested while under the care of the insured because it found that an intent to injure is inherent in the act of sexually abusing a child. Marshall held that an intentional injury exclusion clause excluded coverage where the insured acted in self defense when he hit his attacker in the head with a gun.
The Swindal court recounted that application of a subjective test to determine the operation of an intentional acts exclusion is well established in Florida:
Florida law has long followed the general rule that tort law principles do not control judicial construction of insurance contracts. Insu
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