Opinion ID: 861144
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: FIRST ISSUE: Did the trial court err when it gave

Text: Defendant’s Instructions D-8 and D-9? The two jury instructions which the trial judge granted Jitney Jungle and of which Dickson complains in this first issue read as follows: JURY INSTRUCTION NO. D-8 The Court instructs the jury that a store operator owes a duty to its customers to exercise ordinary care to keep the premises in a reasonably safe condition or to warn the customer of hidden or concealed perils which the store operator knows of or should know of in the exercise of reasonable care. But the responsibility of the store operator is not absolute; it is not that of an insurer. The store operator is entitled to assume that the customer will see and observe that which would be obvious through reasonably expected use of an ordinary person's senses. There is no duty to give the customer notice of an obvious defect or condition. JURY INSTRUCTION NO. D-9 The Court instructs the jury that a customer in a store such as Johnny Dickson has a duty to use ordinary reasonable care for his own safety and to use that degree of care and prudence which a person of ordinary intelligence and prudence would exercise under the same or similar circumstances and must make reasonable use of his own faculties to observe and avoid dangers upon the premises. The Court further instructs the jury that a store owner has no duty to warn a customer of a dangerous condition that is open and obvious to anyone exercising ordinary or reasonable care for his own safety. Therefore, the Court instructs you that if you find from a preponderance of the evidence in this case that the condition of the floor was open and obvious to anyone exercising ordinary and reasonable care for his own safety and that Johnny Dickson failed to exercise ordinary or reasonable care for his own safety, then he was negligent and should you find from a preponderance of the evidence that such negligence was the sole proximate cause of the accident in question and the injuries to Johnny Dickson, if any, it is your sworn duty to return a verdict for the Defendant, Jitney Jungle Stores of America, Inc. Dickson initiates his argument on this issue with the rhetorical question, Is Mississippi truly a comparative negligence state?, which he then answers, ‘Not totally,’ because of the resort to contributory negligence’s being a total bar via the use of the open and obvious danger doctrine, which ignores the negligence of the original actor in creating the hazard and places the entire blame on the injured party for either not seeing what he or she should have seen, and being hurt by what is described by others as an ‘open and obvious’ danger, or by the failure to recognize the hazard presented by the conditions present. He further argues that the open and obvious danger is the purest form of contributory negligence being a bar to the claim of an injured party, and that it shortcuts the ‘assumption of the risk’ doctrine which requires that, at least, the injured party recognize the hazard and voluntarily expose himself or herself to that danger. Dickson concludes his argument by submitting that the time has come for this Honorable Court to give the ‘open and obvious danger rule’ its proper demise and burial, since it is not only violative of the comparative negligence statute, but is an assumption of risk defense with two key elements missing, that being the recognition of the hazard and a voluntary exposure to the known hazard. On July 6, 1994, Dickson filed his brief with the Mississippi Supreme Court. Fifteen days later, on July 21, 1994, that court unknowingly accepted Dickson’s invitation to give the ‘open and obvious danger rule’ its proper demise and burial in Tharp v. Bunge Corp., 641 So. 2d 20, 25 (Miss. 1994) when it advised the bench and bar: We now abolish the so-called open and obvious defense and apply our true comparative negligence doctrine. The jury found that there was negligence in the case at hand; the trial judge erred in construing the open and obvious defense as a complete bar when it really is only a mitigation of damages on a comparative negligence basis under Miss. Code Ann. § 11-7-15. Section 11-7-15 of the Mississippi Code establishes the principle that in personal injury cases like the one sub judice, [c]ontributory negligence shall not bar a recovery, but damages shall be diminished by the jury in proportion to the amount of negligence attributable to the person injured. Miss. Code Ann. § 11-7-15 (1972). The Mississippi Supreme Court has reaffirmed that the open and obvious doctrine is not a complete defense to negligent actions in premise liability cases where the condition complained of is unreasonably dangerous. Tate v. Southern Jitney Jungle Co., 650 So. 2d 1347, 1351 (Miss. 1995); see also Downs v. Choo, 656 So. 2d 84, 87 (Miss. 1995) (reversing the trial court’s grant of summary judgment to defendant store owner in claim filed by customer who slipped and fell on banana and saying that the parties should have the benefit of the supreme court’s change in . . . jurisprudence). Nevertheless, the supplanting of the open and obvious defense in premises liability claims by applying the concept of comparative negligence as provided in Section 11-7-15 does not automatically condemn Jitney Jungle’s Instructions D-8 and D-9. In Bunge, 641 So. 2d at 24, the supreme court explained the manner in which comparative negligence supplanted the open and obvious defense as follows: The defendant may be negligent, but so too may be the plaintiff. Thus, our comparative law applies. The open and obvious standard is simply a comparative negligence defense used to compare the negligence of the plaintiff to the negligence of the defendant. If the defendant was not negligent, it makes no difference if the dangerous condition was open and obvious to the plaintiff since the plaintiff must prove some negligence on [the] part of the defendant before recovery may be had. On the other hand, if the defendant and the plaintiff were both at fault in causing or attributing to the harm, then damages can be determined through the comparative negligence of both. Theoretically, if a plaintiff is ninety-nine (99%) percent negligent and the defendant is only one (1%) percent negligent, the plaintiff is still entitled to recover the one percent (1%) attributable to the negligence of the defendant. To preserve for this Court’s review an error based on the granting of a jury instruction, the litigant must state to the trial judge the ground on which he objects to the granting of the instruction. Haddox v. State, 636 So. 2d 1229, 1240 (Miss. 1994) (the assertion on appeal of grounds for an objection [to a jury instruction] which was not the assertion at trial is not an issue properly preserved on appeal.).
With the foregoing discussion in mind, we first consider Instruction D-8, which we quoted earlier. Dickson’s counsel objected to the trial judge’s giving Instruction D-8 because there is no proof on an open and obvious defect to support this instruction and because it violates the comparative negligence doctrine . . . . The first objection is disingenuous because it potentially can be interpreted to mean that if there was no evidence of an open and obvious defect to support this instruction, then there might be no evidence of any defect, latent, or otherwise to support Dickson’s claim for damages against Jitney Jungle. Dickson does not pursue this first objection in his brief. The second basis for Dickson’s objection, it violates the comparative negligence doctrine . . . . requires this Court to consider Instruction No. P-9, which the trial court gave at Dickson’s request. Instruction No. P-9 reads as follows: The Court instructs the jury that there may be more than one proximate cause of an accident and damages. If you find from a preponderance of the evidence in this case that the Defendant, Jitney Jungle Stores of America, Inc., was negligent as defined by the Court’s instructions; and that its negligence, if any, proximately contributed to cause the Plaintiff’s fall and his injuries and damages, if any, and you further find from a preponderance of the evidence that the Plaintiff, Johnny Dickson, was also negligent as defined by the Court’s instructions; so that the combined negligence of the Defendant and of the Plaintiff proximately caused the accident, the Plaintiff’s injuries and damages, if any, proximately caused thereby, you must determine the total amount of the Plaintiff’s damages, and reduce them by the percentage, if any, which Johnny Dickson’s negligence, if any, contributed to the accident. We must further recite that the trial judge’s Instruction No. C-1 which he gave to the jury contained the following paragraph: You are not to single out one instruction alone as stating the law, but you must consider these instructions as a whole. Now this Court hearkens back to its standard of review which it previously quoted, and determines that Jitney’s Instruction D-8 properly presented to the jury the issue of whether Dickson was comparatively negligent and that when Instruction P-9 is read and considered as a whole, the issue of Dickson and Jitney Jungle’s comparative negligence was properly presented to the jury for their consideration and resolution. Thus, the trial court’s granting Instruction D-8 which Jitney Jungle requested was not error because that instruction must be read in conjunction with all the other jury instructions, including the trial judge’s own instructions in which he instructed the jury not to single out one instruction alone as stating the law, but [instead] consider these instructions as a whole.
Dickson argues that the trial judge erred when he granted Instruction D-9 which Jitney Jungle requested for the following reasons: The facts of this case . . . clearly show that Jitney Jungle denied the existence of water [on] the floor [in] aisle 9, where water was previously known to accumulate due to clogged and overflowing drains from the freezer units on aisle 8, and be granted a jury instruction which invokes the open and obvious danger rule based on the vague terms condition of the floor was open and obvious to anyone exercising ordinary and reasonable care for his own safety without describing what condition the jury was supposed to find was open and obvious which caused Dickson to slip and fall. This instruction allows Jitney Jungle to escape it’s admitting that there was a hazard on the floor, and puts the entire blame on the Plaintiff. It further allowed the jury to ignore the hidden or latent problems of the stopped-up and backed-up and overflowing drains of which the proprietor had superior knowledge and about which it failed to warn Dickson and other business invitees. Dickson proceeds to ask, Where is the proof that the water on the floor was open and obvious to Johnny Dickson? There is a complete absence of proof to support this instruction. He further argues that there is no dispute that Dickson was not warned of the known propensities of water overflowing onto the store’s floors at any time by the Jitney Jungle personnel. Therefore, Dickson concludes that Instruction D-9 was not factually based. For a jury instruction properly to be given, there must be an evidentiary basis for it. Rester v. Lott, 566 So. 2d 1266, 1269 (Miss. 1990). In this case the vagueness of the condition of the floor on which Dickson slipped and fell actually reflected the Plaintiff’s bare discharge of his burden of proof that indeed the floor was wet where he slipped and fell. The store’s co-manager, Claude Smith, testified that when he got to Dickson in aisle nine there was so much milk on the floor that he could not tell whether there was water in addition to the milk on the floor. Not one of the three police officers who responded to Dickson’s call for assistance testified that water was the cause of the damp area on the floor in which Dickson had fallen. In short, Dickson’s complaint that Instruction D-9 was unsupported by any evidence about the specific condition of the floor is almost tantamount to an admission that he had failed to establish by a preponderance of the evidence the source of the damp area and thus Jitney Jungle’s negligence. Be that as it may, Instruction D-9 was factually consistent with Dickson’s claim that he had slipped on a wet area on the floor in aisle number 9 which had been caused by the freezers’ leaking into a clogged drain when they defrosted, about which the store’s management knew. Thus, we hold that the trial judge did not err when he granted Instruction D-9. Dickson offers no argument of law to support his contention that the trial judge erred when he gave Instruction D-9 to the jury. With regard to the argument that Instruction D-9 violates the comparative negligence doctrine, we repeat that the trial court’s giving Instruction P-9, which Dickson requested, adequately instructed the jury on this issue and was therefore consistent with the Mississippi Supreme Court’s supplanting the open and obvious danger defense with the statutory concept of comparative negligence.