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Travelers Indemnity Co. v. PCR Incorporated12/9/2004
insurer will not be relieved of its obligations under a liability policy containing such an exclusion unless the insured has acted with such specific intent.
Id. (quoting 44 Am. Jur. 2d, Insurance, ยง 1411, at 259). The other case relied on by the federal district court was Phoenix Insurance Co. v. Helton, 298 So. 2d 177 (Fla. 1st DCA 1974), in which the First District Court of Appeal followed Cloud. 298 So. 2d at 180-82.
Travelers does not dispute the authority of Cloud and Helton. Rather, Travelers argues that a Turner claim is more appropriately analyzed under our decision in Landis v. Allstate Insurance Co., 546 So. 2d 1051 (Fla. 1989). Relying on Landis, Travelers argues that the law should impute intent to injure in cases where the insured's conduct was substantially certain to result in injury . Landis, however, does not support this argument.
In Landis, an insured who was being sued for sexually molesting several children sought coverage under his homeowner's insurance policy. The insured argued that the policy's injury -intentionally-caused exclusionary clause did not apply because he had not "specifically intended" to cause harm. Id. at 1053. We rejected this argument because
" o state that a child molester intends anything but harm . . . to the child defies logic." Id.
" ome form of harm inheres in and inevitably flows from the proscribed behavior." Id. (quoting Zordan v. Page, 500 So. 2d 608, 614 (Fla. 2d DCA 1987) (Frank, J., dissenting)).
We went on to state that "specific intent to commit harm is not required by the intentional acts exclusion. Rather, all intentional acts are properly excluded by the express language of the homeowners policy." Id. This statement caused confusion, and in Swindal we made clear that
Landis in no way changed the law set forth [in Cloud and Helton]. Landis held that an intentional injury exclusion clause excluded coverage for injuries suffered by children who were sexually molested while under the care of the insureds. This Court unanimously rejected the insured's argument that coverage should not be excluded because the insured intended no harm, holding instead that harm always results from child sexual abuse such that any intent to molest necessarily carries with it an intent to harm. . . . Our decision in Landis did not suggest that courts apply tort law causation principles of "reasonably foreseeable" or "natural and probable consequences" in construing the intentional injury clause in insurance contracts. Rather, we merely found that an intent to injure is inherent in the act of sexually abusing a child.
622 So. 2d at 471-72 (citations omitted) (emphasis added). We reiterated that
Florida law has long followed the general rule that tort law principles do not control judicial construction of insurance contracts. . . . Thus, intentional act exclusions are limited to the express terms of the policies and do not exclude coverage for injuries more broadly deemed under tort law principles to be consequences flowing from the insured's intentional acts.
Id. at 470.
We reject Travelers' argument that conduct satisfying Turner's objectively-substantially-certain standard can and should be equated, for purposes of imputing intent to injure, with the conduct at issue in Landis. Our holding in Landis rested on the uncontroversial fact that injury inheres in and inevitably flows from an act of sexual molestation; the act and the harm cannot be separated. (Even more important, particularly with respect to the issue of public policy, which we discuss below, is the lack of the element of fortuity between the act and the resulting harm. The
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