Opinion ID: 2023474
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Sudden-Emergency Instruction.

Text: Ankrum and Strutz requested the following sudden-emergency instruction: Strutz claims that if you find that she violated the law in the operation of the vehicle, she had a legal excuse for doing so because she was confronted with a sudden emergency and, therefore, is not negligent. A sudden emergency is a combination of circumstances that calls for immediate action or a sudden or unexpected occasion for action. A driver of a vehicle who, through no fault of her own, is placed in a sudden emergency, is not chargeable with negligence if the driver exercises that degree of care which a reasonably careful person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances. This instruction follows our Uniform Instruction. See 1 Iowa Civ. Jury Instructions 600.75 (2001). The doctrine of sudden emergency allows a fact finder to excuse a defendant's failure to obey statutory law when confronted with an emergency not of the defendant's own making. Weiss v. Bal, 501 N.W.2d 478, 480 (Iowa 1993). In addition to excusing a failure to obey statutory law, the doctrine of sudden emergency also has independent significance in common-law claims. Id. Sudden emergency has been defined as (1) an unforeseen combination of circumstances which calls for immediate action; (2) a perplexing contingency or complication of circumstances; (3) a sudden or unexpected occasion for action, exigency, pressing necessity. Bangs v. Keifer, 174 N.W.2d 372, 374 (Iowa 1970). The district court rejected the requested instruction on the ground the emergency was not sudden. The testimony at trial as to the time for the defendant to react to the situation, given the most favorable construction possible in favor of [Ankrum], Greenwood v. Mitchell, 621 N.W.2d 200, 205 (Iowa 2001), was that it was probably ten or fifteen seconds after the altercation began before Strutz stepped on the accelerator. We agree with the district court's assessment: a sudden emergency is an event that require[s], if not an instantaneous response, certainly something fairly close to that. As we said in Weiss: This is not a case in which a driver was suddenly confronted with oncoming traffic on the wrong side of the road, an unexpected patch of ice, a nonnegligent failure of brakes, or a sudden heart attack. 501 N.W.2d at 482. The defendants had ten to fifteen seconds to think and to act. This was sufficient time, under the circumstances, to assess the situation, make some judgment calls, and drive off without striking the plaintiff. The doctrine of sudden emergency has fallen into considerable criticism and has even been abandoned in some jurisdictions. See id. at 480-81. We have expressed some concern because of the tendency to unduly emphasize one aspect of the case, although we have not rejected the doctrine. See id. at 481. If we were to hold the instruction on sudden emergency was required in the present case, we would not just preserve the doctrine, we would expand it well beyond its appropriate scope. The district court did not err in refusing the instruction.