City & County of San Francisco v. Workers' Compensation Appeals Board

Opinion

TOBRINER, J.

For nearly forty years, Labor Code section 3212.5 has provided that when a police officer who has been employed for five or more years develops “heart trouble,” the condition is presumed, subject to rebuttal, to have arisen out of and in the course of his employment and thus to be compensable under the workers’ compensation law. In 1959, the Legislature amended the section to provide that an employer may not rebut section 3212.5’s presumption, and thus may not defeat an ailing police officer’s workers’ compensation claim, on the basis of evidence attributing the officer’s…