Maryland: Police Officer Recovers Under Special Errand Doctrine

A police officer, who sustained injuries in a motorcycle accident while traveling home after attending police training held at a different site from his usual workplace, and which was held on a day that he had been scheduled to be using personal leave, was entitled to workers’ compensation benefits under Maryland’s special mission or errand exception to the going and coming rule, agreed a state appellate court. The County contended that travel to and from the training was akin to the officer’s usual commute to his place of employment, thereby invoking the going and coming rule, and prohibiting recovery in an accident that occurred en route to his home. The court, citing earlier case decisions, disagreed, holding the trip to be sufficiently unusual—the officer had never been required to travel to this particular governmental complex for training—and sufficiently “onerous,” that it was properly considered a special errand.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Baltimore County v. Morrison, 2017 Md. App. LEXIS 953 (Sept. 15, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 14.05.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law