Court Opinion

ID: 9442774
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 18:58:54.384688+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:13.452724
License: Public Domain

CHASE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The special verdict exonerated the brakeman on the car which struck the decedent. This left .as the only possible ground for liability of the' appellant under the Employers’ Liability Act, 45 U.S.C.A. § 51 et seq., the failure to provide a safe place for the decedent to work, i. e., a safe way to go to work and to go away from work across the property of the railroad. Though the jury found that no such safe way was provided, that was not the proximate cause of the death. It was, on the contrary, caused by conditions at- a place where the decedent was, and knew he was, prohibited from going. But the railroad was under no statutory liability for failing to make safe for the decedent a way to go to or from his place of work over that part of the railroad’s property where the decedent was not only not required, but was not even permitted, to be. Philadelphia & R. Ry. Co. v. Thirouin, 3 Cir., 9 F.2d 856.
The special verdict does, indeed, show that the appellant knew, or should have known, of a practice of violating the above prohibition. But there was evidence that violators were disciplined for that and there wa.s no finding that the railroad acquiesced in such violations; nor was that question left to the jury despite the railroad’s effort to have it. It was, I think, plain error not to submit that question to the jury with the others. That error led to the next which was to treat the prohibition as impugned in the absence of anything to show, by way of special verdict or general submission of such questions in the charge, that the jury found that the appellant acquiesced in the violation of it or gave the decedent some reasonable ground for believing he need not observe it. See Restatement, Agency, Sec. 526, comment e; St. Louis Ry. Co. v. Stewart, 124 Ark. 437, 187 S.W. 920.
Moreover, as a contributing cause of this employee’s death was his violation of a specific rule of the railroad which had been adopted for his own safety, it may be that the legal effect of that, as shown by Van Derveer v. Delaware L. & W. R. Co., 2 Cir., 84 F.2d 979, certiorari denied 299 U.S. 595, 57 S.Ct. 120, 81 L.Ed. 438, has survived the abolition of the defense of assumption of risk.
f would reverse and remand.