Opinion ID: 1320200
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Consent of the Decedent

Text: The trial court instructed the jury, over appellants' objection, that [a] person may expressly or by voluntarily participating in an activity consent to an act which would otherwise be a battery. In the context of this case, the giving of this instruction was reversible error. As appellants point out, they had abandoned their claim of assault and battery, and the instruction was therefore irrelevant to any material issue in the case. The jury, however, would be entitled to assume that the instruction was relevant, and to use it in their assessment of decedent's degree of responsibility for his resulting death. The jury may well have deduced from this instruction that one who voluntarily participates in an activity in legal contemplation assumes the risk of all negligent or intentional conduct by others. After all, [s]ince under our jury system, the jury does not have the function of deciding questions of law, the primary purpose of instructions must be to inform the jury, as triers of facts, what fact issues are to be favorably decided to reach each possible verdict. Stanich v. Western Union Tel. Co., 348 Mo. 188, 153 S.W.2d 54, 56 (1941). Further, in the context of this case, the instruction was so incomplete as to be misleading. To be effective, consent must be (a) by one who has the capacity to consent ... and (b) to the particular conduct, or to substantially the same conduct. 4 Restatement (Second), Torts § 892A, at 364 (1979). As this court has held, consent is not effective as a defense to battery where the beating is excessively disproportionate to the consent, given or implied, or where the party injured is exposed to loss of life or great bodily harm. Wright v. Starr, 42 Nev. 441, 446, 179 P. 877 (1919). Furthermore, capacity to consent requires the mental ability to appreciate the nature, extent and probable consequences of the conduct consented to. Restatement, Torts, supra, comment b, at 365. As noted by Prosser, Law of Torts, § 18, at 102 (4th ed. 1971), [i]f the plaintiff is known to be incapable of giving consent because of ... intoxication ... his failure to object, or even his active manifestation of consent will not protect the defendant. In McCue v. Klein, supra , the widow of a man who had died as a result of drinking a toxic quantity of alcohol sued those who had furnished him the alcohol and induced him to drink it, on a wager. The court held, 60 Tex. at 169, [T]he maxim of volenti non fit injuria presupposes that the party is capable of giving consent to his own injury. If he is divested of the power of refusal by mental faculties, the damage cannot be excused on the ground of consent given. A consent given by a person in such condition is no consent at all,  more especially when his state of mind is well known to the party doing the injury... . And so if one whose mental faculties are suspended by intoxication is induced to swallow spiritous liquors to such excess as to endanger his life, the persons taking advantage of his condition of helplessness and mental darkness and imposing the draught upon him must answer to him if such injury should fall short of the destruction of life, and to his family if death should be the result. We conclude that in view of all the circumstances the instruction may have misled the jury, and it should not have been given. Zelavin v. Tonopah Belmont, 39 Nev. 1, 7, 149 P. 188, 189 (1915).