Opinion ID: 296747
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: appeal by morris

Text: 10 (A) 11 Before dealing with Morris' appeal on its merits, it is necessary to dispose of a motion by Uhl & Lopez for dismissal of his appeal on the ground that the notice of appeal filed was premature and therefore not effective. 12 Morris had filed notice of appeal after entry of the judgment against him on the Uhl & Lopez trial and after denial had been made by the court of his subsequent motions for a reopening of the case or for a new trial thereof. At that time, however, dismissal of the cross-claim of the United States against Uhl & Lopez and of its claim on third-party complaint against Gottlieb had not yet occurred. Because no order had been entered under Rule 54(b), F.R.Civ.P., making the judgment against Morris separably final, Uhl & Lopez moved in this Court to have the attempted appeal dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. This Court entered an order authorizing the trial court to entertain a motion to have the Morris judgment given separable finality, but it expressly retained jurisdiction of the cause for all other purposes. Before any motion was so made, the court entered the judgments of dismissal referred to, disposing of the two indemnity claims, thereby terminating all aspects of the litigation and leaving all judgments in the case subject to the right of appeal. Morris did not file another notice of appeal, but proceeded on the basis of the notice previously filed and in reliance upon the order of this Court retaining jurisdiction. 13 In our view, the notice of appeal had capacity in the circumstances to provide jurisdictional basis that would entitle this Court to refuse, as it did, to make dismissal of the appeal out-of-hand and to allow the notice to ripen into full effectiveness as to the rendered judgment, since it seemed apparent that the judgment would remain unchanged in its form and content; that its lack of technical formal finality would become dispelled in natural course and within a not undue period of time; and that no prejudice could result to any one from so dealing with the notice. 14 If any elements or events might thereafter intervene which could cause the notice to become defeasant in its jurisdictional hold, the Court could then engage in appropriate dismissal in relation to it. It may incidentally be observed that such a treatment of the notice does not involve a violation of the provision of Rule 26, F.R.App.P., that the court may not enlarge the time for filing a notice of appeal. It should be added that the soundness of this viewpoint finds support in United States v. Arizona, 346 U.S. 907, 74 S.Ct. 239, 98 L.Ed. 405, reversing the judgment in 206 F.2d 159 (9 Cir. 1953); Eason v. Dickson, 390 F.2d 585 and other Ninth Circuit decisions; Markham v. Holt, 369 F.2d 940 (5 Cir. 1966); and Keohane v. Swarco, Inc., 320 F.2d 429 (6 Cir. 1963). 15 We accordingly hold that this Court properly could refuse at the time to dismiss the appeal on the notice that was filed; that it had the right to continue the notice in effect, to retain jurisdiction of the appeal thereunder in the natural ripening of the judgment into formal finality, and to deal with the merits of the appeal thereon unless intervening elements or events should give defeasance to the effect or application of the notice; and that the present renewed motion of Uhl & Lopez for dismissal therefore should be and hereby is overruled. 16 (B) 17 Proceeding to the merits of Morris' appeal, the only question which it is necessary to discuss, in view of the result we reach, is whether the court's finding that Morris had been guilty of contributory negligence was legally erroneous in having been made upon the basis that Morris had failed to comply with the safety standards and recognized practices of the industry, when the evidence could not be said to show expressly that these recognizedly had application to situations of successive or secondary pole mountings, such as here involved on the part of Morris, but they were merely testified to as having application to a pole mounting by a lineman in general and hence in our opinion only clearly established that they were mandated requirements in initial or primary climbings. 18 Some of the uncontroverted aspects of the situation will first be stated. Morris was an experienced electrical lineman of journeyman status. He and another journeyman lineman named Williams had been working together on incidents of the line-work which was to be done under the Gottlieb contract. An employee of Uhl & Lopez named White had the responsibility of inspection and supervision of the Gottlieb work as it proceeded, but White was not present at the time of the accident. Just prior to the accident, Morris had been working by himself upon another pole and when this task was completed he came over to the pole on which Williams was working and where Szymanski, the foreman of Gottlieb, was standing. Szymanski told Morris what the work consisted of that was to be done upon the pole and directed him to go up and assist Williams. The two workmen were to sever and lower to the ground four wires extending out from one side of the pole, but were to leave remaining in position the lines coming in on its other side. 19 The evidence further is without dispute that electric utility poles are regarded in the industry and in the work field as presenting in general a possibility of hazard from internal decay to any mounting of them. There also is no real dispute that in this possibility of hazard there had come to exist standards and practices, referred to above, as to taking precautions of a certain type or character by a lineman before mounting a pole; that these consisted in the first instance of a number of detection tests as to the condition of the pole which a lineman would use at least one or more of, depending upon the situation; that the simplest and most commonly used one of these tests was to strike the pole at or near its base with a hammer or a steel bar to detect if it had a hollow sound; and that if a lineman thus deemed a pole to be unsafe to climb, he had the right to refuse, with impunity, to do so until some appropriate safeguards were authorized or made. 20 There also was testimony that, under the standards and practices, if the work which a lineman was to do would substantially alter the stress or strain upon a pole — such as removal of the four wires here from one side of it — he had the duty to engage in or request such counterbalancing or compensatory guying as he deemed necessary to assure that the pole would be safe to work on. 21 Morris admitted that the only thing he had done as to detecting the condition of the pole was to look or glance at its outer appearance on the side toward him before he mounted it. He testified that the pole looked all right to him in its outer appearance; that beyond this he had relied on the fact that Williams had already mounted the pole and was working at its top when he got there; that he had worked with Williams for some time and regarded him as a competent and prudent lineman; and that on these elements, together with Szymanski's presence and direction to him, he had not deemed any detection tests or other protective appraisals and measures to be required of him or to be necessary, such as would be incumbent upon a lineman who was making an original climbing. 22 The Court's finding on contributory negligence was as follows: 23 7. Plaintiff knew, or in the exercise of reasonable care, should have known that pole 100 was unsafe to perform the work requested of him by his employer. That said pole was defective at its base, but that it was held up by a guy wire and by a heavy electric line. That when the line dropped, the pole fell. That plaintiff knew that the line was to be dropped and, nevertheless, climbed the pole without any investigation and without providing some means to hold the pole in place. That such conduct was negligent and contributed to the accident. 24 We would, as what has been previously said intimates, have no difficulty with this finding as a basis for the contributory negligence held by the court to exist, if the situation had been one of Morris being the only or the initial lineman to mount the pole. In holding, however, to the effect that Morris had a duty to engage in investigation and appraisal and to have provided some means to hold the pole in place it seems clear that the court regarded the standards and practices referred to as having application establishedly and recognizedly in the field to Morris' situation of successive mounting, the same as if it had been an initial one. 25 If such an application did establishedly and recognizedly exist as to a second, and hence necessarily also as to a third, fourth, or fifth successive mounting, it would in our opinion represent a fact special or peculiar to the industry and not a matter of common knowledge or ordinary concept, and thus would have to be expressly proved in order to enable or entitle it to be held to be a fact. It would not within layman's general view be believed, we think, except on special knowledge from express proof, that a lineman who was mounting a pole successively to another of equal skill was industrially required to engage in the same ritual of detection testing and hazard appraising as was imposed upon an original mounter, and that there existed in the industry no right whatsoever on the part of a crew member or co-worker to rely on or place any trust in what the original mounter had or could be deemed to have done — even where the situation was one as here of the original lineman being at the time working on top of the pole. The court would not, if the case had been tried to a jury, have been able to instruct that the evidence entitled it to be found as an established fact that the general standards and practices testified to recognizedly had application in the industry to Morris' successive mounting of the pole. No more could the court on the evidence regard this as a proven fact on which to predicate or make its own finding of contributory negligence turn. 26 The closest that the evidence approached to this aspect was in the testimony of a witness named Duncan. Duncan had been a journeyman lineman for a number of years and was at the time the safety director for a utility company. The court apparently regarded him as possessing such qualification as to be an expert in the field and so to be entitled to give opinion testimony in relation to the accident. It accordingly permitted a hypothetical question to be put as to what a prudent lineman would have done in the circumstances of the situation. The question, however, did not include as a specific element the matter of a successive mounting being involved as against an initial one. It called upon the witness to state, without any reference being made to the fact of Williams' prior mounting and presence on the pole, what precautions he would have taken within the standards and practices of the industry prior to climbing that pole and performing that removal work. 27 When Morris' counsel interposed objection to the question for failure to include the Williams' aspect in its hypothesized facts, counsel for Uhl & Lopez chose not to add this to the question. The court stated that the element could be gone into on cross-examination and permitted the question to be answered as asked. The witness was thus free to answer abstractly or generally and not specifically in relation to Morris' situation. Morris' counsel did thereafter attempt to go into the matter on cross-examination. Thus he put the question to the witness in relation to one of the detection tests which the latter had enumerated whether each individual lineman who climbed a pole as part of a crew would engage in making such a test, to which the witness gave the answer I would. When pressed, however, he admitted that originally when he was a lineman he might not have done so but I had one [pole] fall with me and I am not taking that chance anymore. 28 The answer of the witness as to what he personally would have done because of his particular experience would not be sufficient to establish that this constituted what other linemen were required to do or would have done in successive mounting situations. Nor do we believe that the answer of the witness was in fact intended to create such an impression or to carry such an implication when read in relation to the admission made in another portion of his testimony. When he was cross-examined about another detection test which he had related and was asked whether each lineman in a crew was supposed to engage in it or if, for instance, the superintendent did it they would rely on his test he candidly replied No, there wouldn't be any need for but one man to test it. 29 The testimony of this witness and of the other witnesses sufficiently established or confirmed that the standards and practices as discussed above constituted a general recognized duty in the industry or lineman's field. But insofar as it is attempted to be contended that the application of the standards and practices went beyond constituting a required duty in sole or initial mountings and extended similarly to all linemen in any successive or crew-member mountings, we think, as stated above, that this would in laymen's concept be regarded as so unusual that it would have to be held to be special or peculiar to the industry, and that it thus would be required to be expressly established by the evidence that such was indeed the fact. We are not able to read the evidence as sufficient to so establish. 30 We accordingly must hold on the record before us that in predicating its finding of contributory negligence upon the basis that the standards and practices had such a recognized application and that Morris was guilty of negligence in not having done the acts or made the appraisals which they required, the court erred. The judgment will accordingly be reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings solely in relation to the issue of contributory negligence. 31 It may be that evidence is available to establish specifically and preponderantly that the general standards and practices as to detection tests and auxiliary evaluations recognizedly have application to the situation of successive mounting here involved. If this is not so established, however, the court's consideration of the question of contributory negligence necessarily must have confinement to a determination on the traditionally normal basis of whether Morris had exercised such general care or prudence as could ordinarily and reasonably be expected of a lineman in the circumstances of the situation.