A widow who lost her husband to his penchant for auto-erotic electrocution has won a major battle in the courts.
Rochester resident Amanda Martin found her husband Paul, 35, lying naked on the floor in the couple’s basement in December 2008 after hooking himself up to a homemade electrical contraption.
Shocking: An insurance company denied Amanda Martin's claim that her husband Paul accidentally killed himself while performing auto-erotic electrocution .
Ms Martin was denied her claim for an accidental insurance award from his employer’s insurance, but a judge has just overturned that verdict and demanded that the Hartford Life-Insurance company pay more than $200,000 in total awards.
Ms Martin sued the insurance company after they claimed ‘Mr Martin’s own volitional acts caused to contributed to the injury which resulted in his death .’
Subsequently, Ms Martin was awarded $162,000 in life insurance benefits but denied accidental death benefits amounting to $81,000.
Police documents show that Ms Martin found her husband lying face-down and half naked in the family’s basement, shortly before they were scheduled to have a festive family brunch with their young daughter.
She saw wires wrapped around his blue arms and turned him over, receiving a shock in the process.
Emergency officials said that Mr Martin’s ‘homemade wire device’ ‘accidentally electrocuted him to death.’
Mr Martin, an electrical engineer, was a diabetic and suffered from erectile dysfunction, Ms Martin told officials, but their marriage was a happy one.
Mr Martin made the device by attaching a black power cord into a regular power strip and soldering on purple wires. One of the purple wires had a soldered bare loop on one end and the other had a handle. The loop at the end of the purple wire was ‘attached to his scrotum,’ police wrote, and he could turn the device on and off with the handle.
Though the police determined the death to be ‘accidental’ the Hartford Insurance company denied the claim.
Last year, a federal judge in Rochester sided with Hartford and also rejected Ms Martin’s suit, but she refused to give up.
Expert witness Dr Stephen J. Hucker, a forensic psychiatrist, argued that electrical stimulation is for enjoyment, not suicide.
‘The use of electrical stimulation to produce sexual excitement and orgasm has been known since at least the nineteenth century,’ Dr Hucker argued. ‘Clearly their intention is to use the instrument repeatedly for sexual enjoyment and not to end their lives.’
Likening Mr Martin’s hobby to rock-climbing, Ms Martin’s attorney ferociously fought for his client.
Irving Pheterson asked the court whether anyone would say that a rock climber’s death from an accidental fall while climbing was ‘caused or contributed by an intentionally self-inflicted injury’ because, he argued, the rock-climber had suffered scrapes and scratches in the past.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, after evaluating all the evidence, declared that Mr Martin’s death was not the result of ‘intentionally self-inflicted injury,’ but rather ‘negligently self-inflicted injury’ and demanded that the case be re-visited.
Source: Daily Mail
