Court Opinion

ID: 9940195
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-02-13 17:19:15.706466+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:42:57.592029
License: Public Domain

I dissent.
While I believe that the able and logical opinion written by Mr. Presiding Justice Barnard and concurred in by Mr. Justice Jennings correctly states the law applicable to the facts of the instant case as that law was announced a number of years ago and as I still believe it should exist, I cannot agree with my associates that the opinion is in accord with the present conception of the law of negligence, contributory negligence and the doctrine of the last clear chance as applied by the courts in the more recent cases. I agree with my associates that our prior decision (138 Cal.App. 540 [32 P. 1091]) has not established the law of the case on this appeal.
The doctrine of the last clear chance is not of recent origin. (Butterfield v. Forrester, 11 East, 60 [103 English Reprint, 926]; Davies v. Mann, 10 Mees. W. 545 [152 English Reprint, 588].) It is a humanitarian doctrine adopted so as not to defeat a claim for damages by a plaintiff who was guilty *Page 370 
of negligence in the first instance in placing himself in a position of danger from which he could not extricate himself by the use of ordinary care and was injured by a defendant who saw him in his position of danger and realized or should have realized his inability to escape, the defendant having the last clear chance of avoiding the injury by the use of ordinary care. This seems to be the most widely accepted rule though it has been varied by additions or subtractions in some jurisdictions.
The reasons for the rule and the conditions under which it may be applied have been variously stated and defined. The basic reasoning of the cases supporting the doctrine of the last clear chance as announced in the greater number of jurisdictions is that while the plaintiff may in the first instance be guilty of negligence in entering a place of danger, the negligence of the defendant in failing to avoid the injury, after realizing the danger and the inability of the plaintiff to escape, when defendant may avoid the injury by the use of ordinary care becomes the proximate cause of the injury and the prior negligence of the plaintiff a remote cause or a condition and not a proximate cause. (45 C.J. 989.) This reasoning was recognized in the case of Girdner v. Union Oil Co., 216 Cal. 197, where at page 203 [13 P.2d 915], it was said:
"The element of continual negligence is present in all last-chance cases. If defendant is not able to avoid injuring plaintiff in the exercise of ordinary care, the plaintiff's original negligence continues to be the proximate cause of his own injury, which bars recovery. If, on the other hand, defendant is able to avoid injuring the negligent plaintiff, and negligently fails to do so, plaintiff's original though continuing negligence only remotely contributes to the injury and is not the proximate cause thereof, and hence the applied doctrine, by its own principles, establishes the right of plaintiff to recover notwithstanding the fact that his original negligence would, by its continuing nature, bar a recovery if the doctrine were not applicable. To hold otherwise would be to dispute its existence."
(See, also, Center v. Yellow Cab Co., 216 Cal. 205
[13 P.2d 918].) I take it that this does not modify but merely tends to explain the rule long applied in California that where the negligence of plaintiff continues up to the moment *Page 371 
of impact and is actively concurrent and contemporaneous with the negligence of defendant, plaintiff cannot recover. I take it that this last-stated rule is still in effect and that the quotation from the Girdner case merely illustrates circumstances under which the doctrine of concurrent and contemporaneous negligence will not be applied. If this were not true and the quotation states a rule, its loose application will lead to permitting juries to compare the negligence of both parties and apply the doctrine of comparative negligence.
In California there has been a growing tendency to leave questions that were once considered questions of law for the court to the jury for determination as questions of fact. This is true in cases where a plaintiff is proven guilty of negligenceper se or negligence as a matter of law. Generally speaking, the question of whether or not such negligence contributed to his injuries is now regarded as a question of fact to be decided by the jury. The same is true of proven negligence of a defendant and the question of its proximate cause of injury and in cases under the doctrine of the last clear chance. In 19 California Jurisprudence, page 656, it is said: "A person causing injury may not rely upon dullness to excuse him from not realizing the dangerous position of another. One who sees the situation of another person must use reasonable diligence in analyzing the situation, and knowledge of danger is imputed where the circumstances are such as to convey to the mind of a reasonable man that the plaintiff is in a position of peril. Ordinarily it is a question for the jury whether or not a defendant apprehended the dangerous position of the plaintiff." In the same volume, at page 732, we find the following:
"The proximity of one fact to another in a case, and their relation and sequence to each other, is essentially within the province of the jury to determine. Whenever the injury complained of is the result of a series of acts that are interlinked or dependent upon each other, the certainty that the final act is the result of a prior one diminishes in proportion to the remoteness of the first act from the result, and the jury must determine whether the several acts constitute such a successive series, or are linked together so as to form one continuous whole, or whether they are so independent that the result cannot be said to be the natural consequence of the first. . . . Likewise, it is for the jury to determine whether *Page 372 
the circumstances of a case are such that the doctrine of last clear chance comes into operation."
This last statement is subject to the qualification that when the evidence contains no conflicts and no conflicting inferences may be drawn from it the question may be one of law for the court. Without taking time to analyze the cases, it is sufficient to say that those cited in the notes to the text and in corresponding sections of the ten-year supplement support the rules announced by the text writer.
It is also the established law in California that a jury is not bound to accept as true the testimony of a defendant as to just when and where he first saw the plaintiff in a position of danger or when or where he first realized or should have realized that the plaintiff was in a position of peril from which he could not extricate himself by the use of ordinary care if there is other evidence, direct or circumstantial, from which a contrary conclusion may reasonably be drawn.
With these rules of law in mind it is necessary for me, to explain my dissent, to analyze evidence which seems to me to be controlling and which appears unimportant to my associates.
The evidence of Zoerb, the motorman of the "one-man car" involved in the accident, is sufficiently detailed in the opinion in chief. This leaves the picture of the witness being engaged in the rightful business of making change until within from seventy-five to one hundred feet of the place of impact or the west line of West Avenue. He then looked up and saw plaintiff driving south on West Avenue. When he had proceeded between forty-five and seventy feet he first realized the danger of a collision. He had been ringing his bell and continued doing so. He applied his brakes and did all he could to stop his car but failed because of lack of time and space. His efforts did reduce the speed of the car from twenty to ten miles an hour.
The testimony of Thyra Aarestrup presents an entirely different picture. She and two men passengers boarded the car at the west end of the line. She paid her fare on entering the car, but the men did not. The street car moved off and gained speed without any slackening to the point of impact and no gong or bell was rung or alarm given. One of the male passengers who had not paid his fare approached *Page 373 
the motorman when the street car was close to the crossing, handed him a bill and received his change; that "the young man paid his fare, got up and paid his fare, and while he was paying the fare — before I could cry out a warning the car was in front of the street car and this accident happened. It was all in a flash." In addition to this testimony there is evidence that the day was clear and the view for at least a quarter of a mile west of the crossing was unobstructed. The windows of the car were shaded and the motorman was at the controls in the front end of the car.
The jurors are the judges of the weight and sufficiency of the evidence and the credibility of the witnesses. They are at liberty to believe or disbelieve all or any part of the testimony of any witness and if their conclusions, as expressed in their verdict, are supported by parts of the testimony of several witnesses I take it that it should not be disturbed on appeal unless the conclusions are inherently improbable.
Applying these rules to the instant case we have the following theory of the accident upon which the jury might have based its verdict: That when the street car was two hundred feet from the point of collision plaintiff was within twenty feet of the north rail of the tracks upon which the street car was traveling; that the two continued on their respective courses toward the point of impact, the street car at twenty and the automobile at about five or less miles per hour; that when the street car had traveled one hundred feet the automobile was proceeding towards the tracks and was so close to the tracks that it was in a position of danger, which fact was seen by Zoerb; that Zoerb then realized or should have realized that plaintiff was in a position of danger of which he was oblivious; that Zoerb did not ring any bell or give any alarm and did not apply his brakes and did nothing to check the speed of the street car but proceeded on his way, allowing his attention to be distracted from the danger in front of him by making change for a passenger when he was so close to the point of collision that the accident thereafter happened "in a flash". It is evident from photographs in the record that the street car struck the rear of the automobile so that it must have been true that about half of it had cleared the tracks before the impact. This evidence, if accepted as true, justifies the conclusion that if, when Zoerb first realized or should have *Page 374 
realized that plaintiff was in a position of danger of which he was oblivious, he had applied the brakes of the street car it would have been either stopped or its speed so reduced that the automobile would have cleared the tracks and there would have been no collision. Without intending to imply that the jury should have adopted these facts as true, they present circumstances which to me make a case in which that body was authorized to return a verdict against defendant under the doctrine of the last clear chance as now applied.
Further, Zoerb testified that he rang the bell of the street car continuously up to the moment of the impact. In Locke v.Puget Sound International Ry. Power Co., 100 Wn. 432
[171 P. 242, L.R.A. 1918D, 1119], the court said that "the continued movement of a person toward a place of danger after a warning sound is notice that he is unaware of his peril, and is enough to break the reciprocal balance of duty, and, if it can be said that he had time to do so, puts upon the motorman the positive duty of avoiding an accident". While the quoted statement seems to me to be too broad and severe to establish a general rule of law to be broadly adopted, still I believe that the fact that a plaintiff, traveling a course that would bring him into collision with an approaching street car, continued that course in the face of repeated warnings is a circumstance that might be taken into consideration in determining the time and place when the motorman should have realized the imminent danger of plaintiff and his obliviousness to such danger and, as a reasonable man, should have endeavored to reduce the speed of the street car and thus have endeavored to have avoided the accident. Of course, whether or not Zoerb gave any alarm is in dispute and I cannot tell what testimony on this question the jury accepted as true.
The doctrine that a plaintiff may be oblivious to his danger and escape the penalty of his negligence through the doctrine of the last clear chance is not new in California. It has been applied either directly or by necessary implication with varying degrees of strictness and success for many years. The following cases are cited merely by way of illustration: Meeks v.Southern Pac. R. Co., 56 Cal. 513 [38 Am. Rep. 67]; Lee v.Market St. Ry. Co., 135 Cal. 293 [67 P. 765]; Harrington v.Los Angeles Ry. Co., 140 Cal. 514 *Page 375 
[74 P. 15, 98 Am. St. Rep. 85, 63 L.R.A. 238]; Green v.Los Angeles etc. Co., 143 Cal. 31 [76 P. 719, 101 Am. St. Rep. 68]; Starck v. Pacific Electric Ry. Co., 172 Cal. 277
[156 P. 51, L.R.A. 1916E, 58]; Darling v. Pacific ElectricRy. Co., 197 Cal. 702 [242 P. 703]; Berguin v. PacificElec. Ry. Co., 203 Cal. 116 [263 P. 220]; Girdner v. UnionOil Co., supra; Center v. Yellow Cab Co., supra; Smith v. LosAngeles Ry. Co., 105 Cal.App. 657 [288 P. 690], broadly approved in Handley v. Lombardi, 122 Cal.App. 22
[9 P.2d 867]; Rasmussen v. Fresno Traction Co., 138 Cal.App. 540
[32 P.2d 1091]. Petitions for hearing were denied by the Supreme Court in each of the three cited appellate court cases.
Three of the foregoing cases deserve careful consideration because of their similarity to the instant case. They areStarck v. Pacific Electric Ry. Co., supra, Smith v. LosAngeles Ry. Co., supra, and Handley v. Lombardi, supra. In one of the cases the plaintiff saw an approaching street car and in another an approaching automobile at about the same distances away that Rasmussen observed the defendant's street car, and both like Rasmussen proceeded into positions of danger and were injured. The judgments were affirmed under the oblivious to danger rule of the doctrine of the last clear chance.
In the Starck case it was said:
"Undoubtedly the plaintiff was astoundingly careless when she turned her back on the approaching car and walked in a leisurely manner parallel to the track. And undoubtedly one about to cross in front of a suburban or interurban car must use his or her faculties and may not depend upon the compliance by the operator of the car with the local by-law relating to speed. (Brown v.Pacific Electric R. Co., 167 Cal. 199, 204 [138 P. 1005];Hutson v. Southern California R. Co., 150 Cal. 701, 703 [89 P. 1093]; Griffin v. San Pedro etc. R. Co., 170 Cal. 772
[L.R.A. 1916A, 842, 151 P. 282].) And undoubtedly there are cases in which a plaintiff so far violates the standard of conduct applicable to all persons that an appellate court may say as a matter of law that upon the undoubted facts, the judgment should be in favor of the defendant. (Chrissinger v. SouthernPacific Co., 169 Cal. 619, 624 [149 P. 175]; Hamlin v.Pacific Electric Co., 150 Cal. 776, 779 [89 P. 1109].) But *Page 376 
here we are confronted with a conflict of testimony. The motorman said that he saw plaintiff as she walked from the sidewalk, and that he was then more than three hundred feet from the place where the accident occurred, but that she did not go into the zone of danger until it was too late to stop the car in time to prevent the accident. But she testified that she first saw the car when it was something like three hundred feet away, and that she had already crossed the first track, and was confronted by the car standing on the second track. The jury may have believed that the part of his testimony regarding the distance from which he first noticed her was true, but that her statement with reference to the position which she occupied when the car was three hundred feet from her was correct. This would place her between the westbound car and the southerly track with a clear space of only twenty inches between the two cars if they should pass, and would give play for the doctrine of `last clear chance'. We do not wish, of course, to imply any views on the part of this court upon the relative verity of the statements of these two witnesses. We merely illustrate our idea that because of the conflict of evidence there was a case to go to the jury."
In the Smith case the court said:
"Another situation which appellant contends should bar plaintiff from the benefit of the rule is where the negligence of the injured party was contemporaneous, concurrent, continuing and contributory with the negligence of the party inflicting the injury. (Young v. Southern Pac. Co., 189 Cal. 746, 754 [210 P. 259].) The law is well settled in this state that the rule cannot be applied to a situation where the negligence of the deceased continued to the moment of the impact and actively contributed to his own injury. The injured party being actively and contemporaneously at fault until the moment of the collision, he is barred from the right to recover for any act up to that time. (Green v. Los Angeles T. Ry. Co., 143 Cal. 31, 41 [76 P. 719, 101 Am. St. Rep. 68].) The liability is placed upon the party inflicting the injury only if, immediately before the actual infliction of the injury, the injured party was in such a situation as to be unable, by the exercise *Page 377 
on his part of reasonable and ordinary care to extricate himself, and vigilance on his part would not have averted the injury (Young v. Southern Pac. Co., supra.) In other words, the `last clear chance' must be solely upon the part of the person inflicting the injury. If both parties have that chance it cannot be said that there is any `last clear chance' at all. However, if plaintiff was oblivious to or unconscious of his position of danger, the question of his duty to extricate himself does not arise, and the doctrine is applicable."
I cannot distinguish the facts of the case of Handley v.Lombardi, supra, from those of the instant case, and consider that case controlling.
I must confess to my inability to rationalize the oblivious to danger rule when applied to the facts of two of the three cases last cited. I cannot understand how a plaintiff who sees a dangerous instrumentality approaching and walks or drives in front of it can be considered oblivious to the danger. I would say that when once apprised of danger approaching under such circumstances the knowledge then obtained would in fact continue in the mind of a plaintiff for the few seconds intervening between seeing the danger and the injury. However, I believe it necessary for me to follow what I consider the established interpretation of the law in this state. This was my controlling thought when the first opinion in Rasmussen v. Fresno TractionCo., supra, was written and filed. Then, as now, I consider myself bound by prior decisions.
My associates seek to distinguish between the Starck, Smith and Handley cases and the instant case because in those cases, street cars operating on city streets and an automobile driving on a city street were involved while in the instant case the street car was traveling on a private right of way. I am not greatly impressed by this attempted distinction. The reciprocal rights, duties and obligations of the operator of an interurban car and an automobile driver are sufficiently set forth in the opinion of my associates and in the opinion on the first appeal. Can it be that there are no substantially, though admittedly not exactly, similar *Page 378 
rights, duties and obligations existing between the street car operator on the city street and the automobile driver? In neither case can the street car leave its rails nor turn out from its course. The interurban street car operator may assume that the motorist will stop if necessary. The law enjoins the city motor car driver to so operate his vehicle that he will not endanger the life, limb or property of another. The operator of the street car on the city street has the right to presume that motorists will obey the law. I can see no important difference between the two sets of circumstances sufficient to apply the oblivious to danger rule in the case of a street car traveling on a city street and reject it in the case of one traveling on a private right of way. If unconsciousness is an excuse in the one case it should be in the other.
There are a multitude of cases in the United States where the oblivious to danger rule, under one name or another, has been applied in cases involving trains or electric cars traveling on private rights of way. For the purpose of illustration I cite the following: Alabama Great Southern Ry. Co. v. McWhorter,156 Ala. 269 [47 So. 84]; Nichols v. Chicago, B. Q.R. Co.,44 Colo. 501 [98 P. 808]; Southern Ry. Co. v. Wahl,196 Ind. 581 [149 N.E. 72]; Tempfer v. Joplin P. Ry. Co.,89 Kan. 374 [131 P. 592]; Black v. New York etc. Co., 193 Mass. 448
[79 N.E. 797, 9 Ann. Cas. 485, 7 L.R.A. (N.S.) 148]; Cavanaugh
v. Boston M.R.R., 76 N.H. 68 [79 A. 694]; St. Louis S.W.R.Co. v. Cambron, 62 Tex. Civ. App. 465 [131 S.W. 1130];Chesapeake O. Ry. Co. v. Corbin's Admr., 110 Va. 700
[67 S.E. 179]. In Ilardi v. Central Cal. Traction Co., 36 Cal.App. 488
[172 P. 763], where the street car was on a private right of way, the oblivious to danger rule was announced and discussed by way of dicta. Of course it was discussed and applied in the first appeal in the instant case where the street car was traveling on a private right of way (138 Cal.App. 540
[32 P.2d 1091]).
It is my conclusion that if the oblivious to danger rule is to be applied where the plaintiff sees the approaching danger and goes on his way it must be applied to trains and cars *Page 379 
traveling on private rights of way as well as to those traveling on city streets.
It is the duty of an appellate court to accept as true the evidence supporting the judgment, to resolve all opposing inferences in favor of the judgment and to draw all reasonably possible inferences in favor of affirmance of the judgment. (MahSee v. North American Acc. Ins. Co., 190 Cal. 421
[213 P. 42, 26 A.L.R. 123]; Witherow v. United American Ins. Co.,101 Cal.App. 334 [281 P. 668].) As there is a theory presented by the evidence under which the doctrine of the last clear chance becomes operative and under which the judgment may be sustained, I conceive it my duty to follow these rules of law and affirm the judgment.
It is thoroughly established in the cases cited in this opinion and that of my associates that if the doctrine of the last clear chance applies to the facts of this case the question of plaintiff's right to recover is one for the jury and is not a matter of law for this court. It being my conclusion that the doctrine may be invoked here, it follows that I believe the judgment should be affirmed if there is no material and prejudicial error in the record, which I have failed to find.
A petition by respondent to have the cause heard in the Supreme Court, after judgment in the District Court of Appeal, was denied by the Supreme Court on September 4, 1936. *Page 380