Virginia: Court Agrees Failure to Wear Seatbelt is Willful Misconduct

A Virginia appellate court affirmed a decision by the state’s Workers’ Compensation Commission that had denied benefits to a truck driver who sustained serious injuries in a vehicle crash on the basis that he had engaged in willful misconduct in violation of Va. Code § 65.2-306(A)(4) when he failed to fasten his seatbelt before driving the vehicle. The court stressed that in the driver’s testimony, he had testified that he intended to buckle the seatbelt at some point. It indicated that such an admission was evidence that his failure to wear the belt had not been an inadvertent mistake.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Mizelle v. Holiday Ice, 2020 Va. App. LEXIS 68 (Mar. 10, 2020)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 34.03.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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