Johnson v. Mead

Opinion

ELKINGTON, Acting P. J.

The above-captioned plaintiffs appeal from an order dismissing their action, against the defendants State of California and its Department of Motor Vehicles (Department), for damages arising out of the death of their nine-year-old daughter. The action was dismissed following the superior court’s order sustaining, without leave to amend, those defendants’

general

demurrer to the causes of action affecting them.

Plaintiffs’ complaint alleged, among other things, the following.

Defendant Mead, while driving an automobile under the influence of alcohol and drugs, struck and killed plaintiffs’ daughter while she was within an intersection’s painted crosswalk. “[T]hat prior to and after licensing Mead the [Department] maintained a file on or record concerning Mead which contains information showing Mead was, at the time of licensing and thereafter, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a chronic user of both alcohol and drugs; a mentally disordered person ... subject to violent outbursts and lapses of consciousness; a user of prescribed medication for the regulation of his mental disorder;... a person unfit to drive upon the roads,... and a person who had had his license suspended or revoked, the cause of which suspension or revocation continued at the time of the application for the aforementioned driver’s license.”

It was further alleged that the Department was under a

mandatory

duty

not

to issue a driver’s license to one such as Mead, or to revoke such a license, if issued, that plaintiffs “are members of the class of people contemplated by the Legislature to be protected by these statutes ...,” and that the Department’s breach of its

mandatory

duties was the proximate cause of their injury.

Government Code section 815.6,a provision of the California Tort Claims Act, provides: “Where a public entity is under a mandatory duty imposed by an enactment that is designed to protect against the risk of a particular kind of injury, the public entity is liable for an injury of that kind proximately caused by its failure to discharge the duty unless the public entity establishes that it exercised reasonable diligence to discharge the duty.”