Supreme Court to hear
PTSD Pension Appeal
The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to hear
an appeal of an unpublished Appellate Division decision (Mount v. PFRS), which upheld a decision by
the PFRS Board of Trustees denying a law enforcement officer’s application for accidental disability retirement based upon a psychological disability. The
appeal concerns the issue of what circumstances
qualify as “undesigned and unexpected” when a law
enforcement officer, or any public employee, seeks a
psychological disability based upon a non-physical event.
By way of background, there are two sets of standards an
employee must meet when applying for an accidental disability pension based upon a psychological disability. Each standard is based upon Supreme Court decisions in Richardson v.
PFRS and Patterson v. SPRS. In Richardson, the court held that
a claimant seeking an accidental disability retirement pension
must prove that he or she is permanently and totally disabled
as a direct result of a traumatic event that is identifiable as to
time and place, is undesigned and unexpected and is caused
by circumstances external to the member but not the result of
a pre-existing disease that is aggravated or accelerated by the
work. The traumatic event must also occur during, and as a re-
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sult of, a member’s regular and assigned duties and
must not be the result of a member’s willful negligence.
There are additional standards in the case of a
psychological disability based upon a non-physical
event, so-called “mental-mental” cases. In Patterson,
the court held that to be eligible for such a pension,
the officer must meet the Richardson standards and
must also demonstrate that the disability resulted
from a “direct personal experience of a terrifying or horror-inducing event that involves actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a similarly serious threat to the physical integrity
of the member or another person.”
With these standards in mind, the Appellate Division decision in Mount v. PFRS involved a municipal officer who was
dispatched to a serious motor vehicle collision. The officer was
trained on how to address scenes of motor vehicle accidents
but was not trained on how to extract occupants from a vehicle
or how to deal with vehicle fire.
Upon arriving at the scene, the officer observed a heavily
damaged car with dark black smoke and saw an arm hanging
out of the driver’s side of the vehicle. There were no signs of life,