Offi cers’ Rights
Application Consternation
Guidance for obtaining accidental disability retirement benefi ts
The board of the Police and Firemen’s Retire-
ment System and Public Employees Retirement
System regularly denies applications for acci-
dental disability retirement benefits arising un-
der N.J.S.A. 43:16A-7. One of the most common
reasons proffered by the board for denial is that
the board contends the traumatic event or acci-
STUART dent giving rise to the application was not “unde-
ALTERMAN signed and unexpected.”
The “undesigned and unexpected” standard
comes from the New Jersey Supreme Court case
Richardson v. Bd. of Trustees, Police & Firemen’s Ret. Sys., 192
N.J. 189 (2007). Under Richardson, any individual seeking an
accidental disability retirement pension must establish 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,
undesigned and unexpected, and is caused by a circumstance
external to the member (not the result of pre-existing disease
that is aggravated or accelerated by the work). The traumatic
event must have occurred during and as a result of the mem-
ber’s regular or assigned duties; the disability must not have
been the result of the member’s willful negligence; and the
member must be mentally or physically incapacitated from
performing his or her usual work or any other available duty.
For years, the board has been pointing to a section of the
case Russo v. Board of Trustees, Police & Firemen’s Retirement
System, 206 N.J. 14 (2011) to support the proposition that,
where an accident occurs as a result of work-related actions
which fall within a member’s job description, a member may
have difficulty meeting the “undesigned and unexpected”
prong of Richardson. The section often quoted by the board
in denying members’ applications for accidental disability re-
tirement benefits provides as follows:
[A]n employee who experiences a horrific event
which falls within his job description and for which
he has been trained will be unlikely to pass the “un-
designed and unexpected” test. Thus, for example,
an emergency medical technician who comes upon a
terrible accident involving life-threatening injuries or
death...will not satisfy Richardson’s “undesigned and
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24
NEW JERSEY COPS
■ OCTOBER 2018