Legal View: Is death caused by sex game an 'accident'?

By Pat Murphy The Daily Record Newswire Let's hope a western New York man's last few moments on earth were worth it. That's because the odds are his widow will be left out in the cold following his final foray into autoerotic stimulation. Paul A. Martin must have had a fascination with electricity from an early age. After all, he chose electrical engineering as his profession, working for MKS Instruments in Rochester. But his fascination with electric power also had a darker side, one which ultimately led to his death. Paul was 38 years old when his wife, Amanda, found his body lying in the basement of their home on the morning of Dec. 13, 2008. According to all the evidence, Paul had electrocuted himself with a home-made wire device that had a bare "loop" made to go around his scrotum. A forensic psychiatrist later hired by Amanda to provide expert testimony concluded that Paul used electrical stimulation to produce sexual excitement and orgasm. The psychiatrist also opined that Paul had been engaged in autoerotic electrocution for at least two years before he died. Of course, Paul didn't intend to kill himself. It was an accident. Accordingly, Amanda filed a claim for accidental death benefits under a policy issued by Hartford Life and Accident Insurance to Paul's employer, MKS Instruments. At first, it looked as though Hartford was going to pay Amanda the $162,000 benefit for what looked like a simple accidental electrocution in a home work area. But then the reports from the Monroe County Sheriff's Department and Medical Examiner began to roll in, revealing the specific circumstances of Paul's death. With the official reports in hand, Hartford concluded that Paul died from a self-inflicted injury related to autoerotic stimulation and denied Amanda's claim. Amanda sued under ERISA, contending that Paul's death was obviously an "accident" within the meaning of the policy because the man was an electrical engineer who would have believed that he could avoid injury. Last week, U.S. District Judge Charles Siragusa granted Hartford's motion for summary judgment in Amanda's ERISA lawsuit, concluding that the policy exclusion for intentional self-inflicted injury barred her claim. The judge explained that the "human body can be injured with as little as two-tenths of an ampere of current, because it can make the heart fibrillate. It is common knowledge that household electrical circuits typically have circuit breakers or fuses that will allow up to fifteen amperes of current to pass before they cut off the flow. ... "If, as [Amanda] Martin's expert states, [Paul] was practicing sexual masochism by giving himself an electric shock with household current, and died during the process of shocking himself, then Hartford's conclusion that the exclusion applies was not an arbitrary and capricious decision." (Martin v. Hartford Life and Accident Insurance) Published: Tue, Apr 5, 2011