Court Opinion

ID: 9534942
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:43:56.926319+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:08.618068
License: Public Domain

WADE, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
I agree with the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice CROCKETT especially “that the verdicts rendered with respect to the contributory negligence of Stone and Sheffy are not necessarily inconsistent.”
As Mr. Justice CROCKETT points out, there is very little similarity between what Stone did to cause the collision and what Sheffy did. Stone allowed the truck he was driving to stop on a traffic lane of a paved highway without lights or flares. This definitely suggests that his own negligence not only proximately caused the collision with the approaching vehicle which .rammed into the parked truck resulting in injury to Stone, but also caused his own injury. On the other hand, all that Sheffy did was to stand by the parked truck to offer assistance when the approaching vehicle rammed into its rear and thereby injured Sheffy. Nothing which Sheffy did in any way caused or contributed in causing the collision. The evidence clearly indicates that Stone’s negligence was a contributing proximate cause of the accident by which he was injured; but there is nothing whatever to indicate that Sheffy did anything whatever which caused the collision resulting in his injury. All he did was to place himself in a position where he was injured by this collision.
*214To me the question of whether Sheffy was negligent seems entirely different from the question of whether Stone was negligent. The question of whether Sheffy’s negligence was a proximate contributing cause of his own injury is closer to, but still different from whether Stone’s negligence was a contributing proximate cause of Stone’s injury. Since the two questions were different there is no inconsistency in the jury’s answers to the interrogatories and we should affirm the judgment in Sheffy’s favor.
Further, I think such a question should be left largely in the discretion of the trial court, and a new trial should be granted only on an abuse of its discretion. Such an abuse of discretion would occur only in case there was a clear showing by the Jury’s answers to the questions that they were confused and did not understand their problems.1 Where mere inconsistency in answers given does not tend to show which of the two inconsistent answers was correct, we should be reluctant to set aside a verdict merely because one of two inconsistent answers was the result of the jury’s confusion.
Since I conclude that the answers were not inconsistent and therefore there is no showing that the jury was confused, I would affirm the verdict.

. See Utah Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 49(b), and Milligan v. Capitol Furniture Co., 8 Utah 2d 383, 335 P.2d 619; Mower v. McCarthy, 122 Utah 1, 245 P.2d 224; Weber Basin Water Conservancy District v. Nelson, 11 Utah 2d 253, 358 P.2d 81; Wellman v. Noble, 12 Utah 2d 350, 366 P.2d 701.