Driving a truck too fast and injuring a fellow officer during a firearms training is not within the scope of employment duties for a Massachusetts police officer, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found. This means his insurer is on the hook for damages caused, the court determined.
Officer Shawn Sheehan is a fourteen-year veteran of the Raynham, Massachusetts, police department and has been a certified firearms instructor for the past seven years. On June 12, 2017, he was paid eight hours of overtime to conduct a firearms training at a firing range on Raynham-owned property. Officer Russell Berry of the Raynham Police Department was also paid eight hours of overtime to attend the day-long training, as all officers were required to do annually.
The officers took a paid lunch break after the morning training session, and Sheehan drove his pickup truck, insured by Commerce, to a nearby store. He testified in court that the lunch was a working lunch in which officers would further discuss firearms, and he remained on the clock during the break.
When Sheehan returned, he drove his truck directly onto the range behind the storage container where other officers sometimes parked rather than in the parking lot. He testified that as he pulled into the range, he drove “faster than [he] should have,” coming in “a little hot, spinning the rear tires.”
He said in his testimony that he “stopped, and then sped up, spinning rocks or gravel” before heading toward the picnic table where Berry sat. Although Sheehan applied the brakes, the truck slid and struck Berry, pinning his leg between the truck and the picnic table. Sheehan was suspended for five days without pay for his misconduct.
Berry sustained severe injuries to his leg and incurred medical bills of more than $130,000. He received leave with pay under Massachusetts’ workers’ compensation act as a result of his injuries. Claiming that Sheehan’s liability was clear, Berry submitted a written demand letter to Commerce stating it was responsible for payments to cover his damages as Sheehan’s auto insurer. Commerce denied coverage, claiming that Sheehan was a public employee acting within the scope of his employment and was immune from tort liability.
As a result, Berry brought an action against Commerce in the Superior Court seeking judgment that Sheehan was not immune from liability. On cross motions for summary judgment, a Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Berry. The court found that Commerce was liable for Berry’s injuries because Sheehan was not acting within the scope of his employment at the time of the accident.
After the case was transferred to the Supreme Judicial Court from the Appeals Court, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt found that Commerce was correct in claiming some tortious acts may still be within the scope of employment. However, she concluded that this was not one of them.
That’s because the court uses a three-part test to determine whether an act resulting in injury falls within the scope of employment. The test considers whether the conduct is something the employee was hired to perform, whether it occurred within authorized time and space limits, and whether it’s motivated by a purpose to serve the employer.
In this case, the court determined that only the second factor — whether the conduct occurred within authorized time and space limits — clearly favors Commerce. The circumstances concerning the first factor — whether the conduct was something the employee was hired to perform – were less clear.
Some details of the incident support the idea that Sheehan was acting within the scope of his employment. He was, after all, conducting mandatory firearms training as part of his employment with the police department that all officers, including Berry, were mandated to attend annually. Both Sheehan and Berry were paid overtime to be at the range, were on town-owned property and were using police department equipment. Even the time spent leaving the range to buy lunch was paid time, the court explained.
However, Sheehan’s injury-causing conduct — driving onto the range too fast in his truck and eventually toward Berry, spinning his tires in the gravel, and braking and causing his truck to slide into Berry — was not part of the duties that he was hired to perform, the court found.
“His unsafe driving was not motivated, even in part, by a purpose to serve his employer,” Wendlandt wrote in the court opinion. “As Sheehan acknowledges, nothing in the dangerous game of driving fast toward the picnic table, behind the storage container where officers were present, slamming on his brakes, and skidding toward the officers furthered the interests of the town.”
With this in mind, the Supreme Judicial Court upheld the Superior Court decision that Sheehan was not acting within the scope of his employment and is therefore not immune from tort liability, rendering Commerce responsible for damages in this case.
The case is Russell Berry vs. Commerce Insurance Company.
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