Opinion ID: 2067045
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Instruction on Sudden Emergency and Legal Excuse

Text: For guidance, we comment on plaintiffs' assignment of error by the trial court in instructing on sudden emergency and legal excuse. The trial court gave the following instructions on legal excuse. INSTRUCTION NO. 19 Charles Davis claims that if you find that he violated the law in the operation of his vehicle, he had a legal excuse for doing so because the jackknifing of the Wilcox/Roadrunner truck presented a sudden emergency and made control of his vehicle impossible. Legal excuse means that someone seeks to avoid the consequences of his or her conduct by justifying the acts which would otherwise be considered negligent. Charles Davis must prove the defense of legal excuse by proving he was confronted with a sudden emergency as defined in Instruction No. 20. If you find that Charles Davis has violated the law as submitted to you in other instructions, and that he has established a legal excuse for doing so, then you should find that Charles Davis was not negligent for violating the particular law involved. The instruction on sudden emergency given by the court reads as follows: INSTRUCTION NO. 20 A sudden emergency is a combination of circumstances that calls for immediate action or a sudden or unexpected occasion for action. An emergency situation does not excuse lack of ordinary care. A driver of a vehicle who, through no fault of his or 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. Our standard of review for jury instructions is whether prejudicial error by the trial court has occurred. Coker v. Abell-Howe Co., 491 N.W.2d 143, 148 (Iowa 1992). Instructions must be considered as a whole, and if the jury has not been misled there is no reversible error. In re Will of Behrend, 233 Iowa 812, 818, 10 N.W.2d 651, 655 (1943). Plaintiffs' error assignment on these instructions reasons thusly. The instructions failed to plainly state that defendant cannot be legally excused if he contributed to the emergency which caused the violation of the law, and merely left the jury to infer this. Plaintiffs assert that those two instructions are fatally flawed because they do not state that the person claiming the legal excuse must prove the emergency that caused his failure to obey the law was not of his own making. Plaintiffs claim that a juror reading these instructions could misapprehend the law and think that when facing a sudden emergency a defendant would be excused from negligence by the doctrine of legal excuse without considering whether the defendant contributed to this emergency or it was of defendant's own making. Plaintiffs cite Iowa Uniform Jury Instruction 600.74 (Legal Excuse) as illustrative and argue that error resulted by not giving the instruction as there stated. Plaintiffs point out that our uniform legal excuse instruction states that the burden is on the defendant to establish a legal excuse and that the emergency is not of his or her own making, whereas the trial court's Instruction No. 19 defines legal excuse and then refers to Instruction 20 for the explanation of sudden emergency. Plaintiff then faults Instruction 20 as failing to state that the emergency defined must not be one of defendant's own making. Plaintiffs cite Weiss v. Bal, 501 N.W.2d 478 (Iowa 1993), arguing that the sudden emergency definition is separate from the elements necessary to establish its use as a legal excuse and mixing the instructions misinforms the jury. We have compared the instructions given with the uniform instructions and conclude that whereas plaintiffs' argument has some merit puristically, it does not reach the level of constituting reversible legal error. Instructions must be considered as a whole, and if some part was given improperly, the error is cured if the other instructions properly advise the jury as to the legal principles involved. Moser v. Stallings, 387 N.W.2d 599, 605 (Iowa 1986). This is the situation in the case at bar. The jury was instructed that an emergency situation does not excuse a lack of ordinary care. Also that a driver, who, through no fault of his or 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. In considering a similar question in Johnson v. Interstate Power Co., 481 N.W.2d 310, 324 (Iowa 1992), we found no error where the law was instructed by reading several instructions together. We found that the gist of a proposed instruction the court refused to give was covered in another instruction. We also noted that the jury was instructed to consider all of the instructions together and that no one instruction contained all the applicable law. Standing alone we do not find that these instructions provide a sufficient ground for reversal. However, on retrial the point raised by plaintiffs should be recognized and instructions given that properly state the law and eliminate the problem cited as an issue here by plaintiffs. DECISION OF COURT OF APPEALS VACATED; JUDGMENT OF THE DISTRICT COURT REVERSED; REMANDED FOR NEW TRIAL.