Court Opinion

ID: 9699055
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 20:08:25.101351+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:46.077361
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring). I agree, for reasons given in the opinion of the Court, that'the trial judge’s unqualified instruction (that “the only obligation that defendants owed him was not to wilfully and wantonly injure him”), applicable as it was to both cases, constitutes error reversible of both cases. I do not agree, however, with the Court’s indiscriminate and quite inconclusive treatment of the subject of parental contributory negligence. To say — without reason or reference to authority — that defense counsel’s argument upon the latter subject “was quite irrelevant and that.the trial judge could properly have *134said so,” and to hold nevertheless that failure of indicated instruction was not prejudicial, is to pave an open way for more error on retrial.
The unvarnished fact is that omission of unequivocal instruction as requested, either in the language of plaintiffs’ request No. 3 or the legal substance thereof, amounts — alone and by itself — to error calling for reversal of the judgment in the plaintiff infant’s case. We should say so, in precedentary words, the better to halt the perceptibly crescent practice of giving common instructions in consolidated jury-tried cases when distinctive instructions for each are due as a matter of law.
Before us are 2 separate rights of action. They arise together from the same factual circumstances, yet differ markedly by force of rules governing sustenance in court of each right. The first of such rights belongs to a little boy; not his parent, guardian, or next friend. He is the legal plaintiff in his case and is the real party in interest. The other, on these proofs, belongs to and is sued upon by the boy’s father, a properly separate plaintiff. In the first the plaintiff’s damages, if recoverable, are direct and personal. In the other such damages are consequential. In the first case contributory negligence of the parent, if any, is a matter of totally prejudicial misguidance if it is permitted to seep into the jury room. In the other it will, if established, bar recovery by the parent seeking such consequential damages.
These firmly established principles of the law of torts and damages (Shippy v. Village of Au Sable, 85 Mich 280; Boehm v. City of Detroit, 141 Mich 277; Feldman v. Detroit United Railway, 162 Mich 486; Love v. Detroit, J. & C. R. Co., 170 Mich 1; Gumienny v. Hess, 285 Mich 411; Hopkins v. Lake, 348 Mich 382, 392) are seemingly and occasionally overlooked in modern days of docket-pressured trial consolidations. They should not be, assuredly, when the con*135ceded failure of due instruction results in improper submission, to a jury, of tbe law governing recovery by an infant for actionable negligence.
Let me say it plainly: Save only as presently indicated tbe only liability question in tbe boy’s case is whether tbe defendants are guilty of causal negligence as charged. If that question should be resolved affirmatively, then no issue of contributory fault will remain,* and tbe boy by law and consequent jury instruction will be entitled to an award of damages. Tbe reverse is true — in pivotal part — of tbe other case, and so is pointed up tbe need for specifically separate instructions upon legally unlike causes tbe court has consolidated for jury trial.
Now let me turn to tbe facts which should be determinative of tbe question whether this second error —below—was harmless or prejudicial. Defendants’ counsel repeatedly stressed in jury argument, manifestly with telling effect against tbe boy’s case, what appears to have been tbe principal jury-defense of both cases, that is, tbe parents of tbe boy were “to blame” for “this accident.” Tbe point was not just touched upon and left. It was played back and forth from top to bottom of tbe oratorical scale. Reference was made to tbe before-accident fact that the boy was “a nervous child”; that be bad to be taken “to tbe Mott Foundation Clinic”; that tbe parents “live on this truck route where these trucks are going through there”; that they live “across the street from a moving and storage company”; that tbe boy was *136“not a normal child”; that they bought him a bicycle (with training wheels) and “gave it to him on his seventh birthday”; that the'parents gave him 2 more bicycles in the years intervening between accident and trial* and, summing up:
“It all reasons out, but I did go beyond that, and I don’t know it isn’t nice to criticize parents for helping their child, and I mean it in the right way, but to me I think the parents were wrong to get those bicycles.”
These cases having been ordered back for proper trial, I would hold that the trial judge enjoyed no discretion whatever with respect to requested instructions aimed toward freeing the boy’s case from argument of and jury-consideration of contributory negligence of his parent or parents. Indeed, considering the independent obligation of trial judges to protect the rights of litigant infants whenever those rights are in issue, a peremptoiy instruction should— whether requested or not — have been given to effect that ‘the issue in the boy’s case was simply that of presence or absence of actionable negligence as defined by the court and, if such negligence be found, that the parents did not by any act or omission on their part affect the boy’s right to recover.
I concur in reversal for stated reasons.
Addendum (February 23, 1960) :
The foregoing dissent was prepared and delivered to members of the Court under the date of February 11, 1960. Since then the Court’s opinion has been amended so that this passage has been deleted therefrom:
“A review of the material objected to convinces us that the argument was quite irrelevant and that the *137trial judge could properly have said so. We cannot, however, view the material cited as so prejudicial that failure to instruct thereon was error which affected the outcome of the trial. See Rouse v. Gross, 357 Mich 475.”
This explains my reason for writing that failure below to grant request No. 3 amounted to reversible— not harmless — error.
Souris, J., took no part in the decision of this case.

 There is the possible exception, of course, of contributory negligence on the part of the boy. Since the eases must go back for retrial I think it well to point out that he, the boy, had just entered the age-realm where his contributory negligence, if any, could become a question of faet (he was 7 years and 1 month old at the time). He is entitled — if the facts warrant submission of the question at all — to careful instruction that the law exacts of a child of such years but a limited degree of care to protect himself from injury. Compare the respectively thorough opinions of Tyler v. Weed, 285 Mich 460.

 This, it would seem, m'ust be classed as parentally contributed negligence after the fact of injury. The legally contributory nature thereof has not as yet been explored in the law of torts.