Smith v. Combined Insurance Co. of America

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• under Virginia law, an insured who “assaults another, or voluntarily enters into an affray and is hurt, has not suffered an accident.”
• insured who resisted arrest, wounded a police officer, and took refuge in a building that was set on fire by police tear gas bombs was not entitled to benefits from accidental-death policy because his death was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of his actions
• “instructions given without objection . . . [while] binding on the jury . . . does not mean that the court [is] powerless while the case [is] under its control to correct errors in its rulings on them”
• insured who resisted arrest, wounded a police officer, and took refuge in a building that was set on fire by police tear gas bombs was not entitled to benefits from accidental-death policy because his death was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of his actions

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).