A wife contracted with a funeral home to bury her husband, who died on July 16, 2003. The night of the death, the wife spoke with the funeral home manager and gave oral permission to embalm her husband.
The next day, she visited the funeral home and signed an authorization to embalm and prepare her husband’s body. The authorization indicated that the embalming would take place as provided by applicable law.
Since the funeral home’s only licensed embalmer was on medical leave, the manager did the embalming, even though he was not licensed. (He testified that he had embalmed thousands of bodies and had worked in the funeral business since 1987.) An apprentice embalmer signed the embalming paperwork, even though she wasn’t a licensed embalmer and had not been present at the embalming. (She received her license 2 weeks after the husband’s body was embalmed.)
Shortly after the funeral, the wife’s daughter read a newspaper article about how the funeral home had not had a licensed embalmer during July 2003. When she told her mother, her mother became very upset.
She sued the funeral home for breach of contract, fraudulent suppression, the tort of outrage, negligence, and negligent supervision. Initially, the Jefferson County Circuit Court granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed that decision and the case went to trial.
At the close of evidence at the jury trial, the circuit court granted a judgment as a matter of law in the wife’s favor on the claim of breach of contract. The jury awarded the plaintiff $350,000 in compensatory damages for the fraudulent suppression and breach of contract. The jury awarded the plaintiff $3 million in punitive damages on the suppression claim, but the court reduced the punitive damages to $1,050,000.
The funeral home appealed. Unable to determine which part of the compensatory damages related to the fraudulent suppression and which to the breach of contract, the Alabama Supreme Court granted a new trial because the circuit court had not properly granted the judgment as a matter of law. See Crestview Memorial Funeral Home, Inc. v. Gilmer, decided August 26, 2011.
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