Connecticut high court grants later disability benefits to retirees

The Connecticut Supreme Court on Tuesday issued two unanimous precedential rulings that grant injured workers who retire voluntarily but who continue to suffer from their injuries access to permanent disability benefits under workers compensation despite having left the workforce.

The state’s highest court reversed appellate court rulings in both Cochran v. Dept. of Transportation, which addresses the continued health complications suffered by a Department of Transportation worker who suffered a spinal injury in 1994 while lifting a 300- to 400-pound tractor-trailer tire over a barrier on the interstate, and Martinoli v. Stamford Police Dept., which addresses disability benefits for a retired 80-year-old police officer who suffered from a stroke in 2015, after he retired.

In Martinoli, the Supreme Court also referred to its same-day decision in Cochran, ruling that “under the plain and unambiguous language of” the law “a claimant who has sustained a compensable workplace injury under the Workers’ Compensation Act… is eligible to receive total incapacity benefits when the total incapacity occurs after the claimant’s voluntary retirement from the workforce.”

The court wrote in Martinoli that the statute “does not contain any exclusions for a worker whose incapacity occurs after retirement, and no such limitation is fairly implied by its context or other relevant components of the act. … It is not the role of this court to engraft additional requirements onto clear statutory language.’’

In Cochran, the court addressed the implications in its decisions: “We acknowledge the concerns expressed by the defendant that employers and their insurers may incur increased and more unpredictable costs if they are required to pay total incapacity benefits to claimants whose eligibility arises after retirement, and that benefits for lost earning capacity paid to retirees may be considered a windfall from one perspective. To the extent that these concerns are compelling, however, they emanate from the statute as written, and their amelioration lies in the hands of the legislature.”