Court Opinion

ID: 9715708
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 06:12:32.303673+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:37.351794
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE HARRISON, dissenting: The appellate court’s judgment should be affirmed. The majority correctly holds that if there is any evidence to support contributory negligence, the employer is entitled to have the jury instructed on that theory. (Uhrhan v. Union Pacific R.R. Co. (1993), 155 Ill. 2d 537, 547.) The law also provides, however, that if no evidence is presented from which a jury could properly find a lack of due care by the employee, it is generally fundamental error for the court to instruct the jury on contributory negligence, and the employee is entitled to a new trial. (Wilson v. Burlington Northern, Inc. (8th Cir. 1982), 670 F.2d 780, 782.) This is such a case. Contrary to the majority’s position, no legitimate argument can be made that Wilson failed to comply with applicable safety rules of the railroad. The uncontradicted evidence established that he followed those rules fully and completely. At issue is the broader question of whether a jury could have found Wilson contributorily negligent on the theory that he could have seen the mudhole and averted injury if only he had been more careful. My colleagues avoid this issue because they cannot answer it. Based upon the record before us, reasonable persons could not have drawn different conclusions from the facts or inferences drawn from those facts. No grounds were presented by which a jury could legitimately have concluded that Wilson was contributorily negligent. Under the FELA, an employee is not bound to exercise care to discover danger that resulted from the employer’s negligence. (Armstrong v. Chicago & Western Indiana R.R. Co. (1932), 350 Ill. 426, 432.) Contributory negligence consists of a careless act or omission on the employee’s part tending to add new dangers to conditions that the employer negligently created or permitted to exist. (Gish v. CSX Transportation, Inc. (7th Cir. 1989), 890 F.2d 989, 991.) No such conduct was present here. Under the uncontradicted and unimpeached evidence, the mudhole was undetectable to one who did not already know its location. Given that Wilson was such a person, no act or omission on his part could have added new danger to the conditions that Missouri Pacific (MoPac) already permitted to exist. MoPac attempts to avoid this conclusion by charging that the witnesses’ description of the mudhole is inherently improbable. A threshold problem with this argument is that a defendant in an FELA case cannot rely solely on the credibility of the plaintiffs testimony to establish contributory negligence. The defendant must produce independent evidence of the plaintiffs lack of due care. (Birchem v. Burlington Northern R.R. Co. (8th Cir. 1987), 812 F.2d 1047, 1049 n.4.) MoPac failed to do that here. The railroad produced no evidence to support its claim that the mudhole would have been visible to members of its train crews had they only been more careful. Even if MoPac could clear this hurdle, its argument would fail. The railroad asserts that if the muddy area was, in fact, undetectable, then Wilson would not have been able to draw a diagram of its location and size as he did, nor would Wilson’s coworker have been able to identify the area’s location. The record shows, however, that while Wilson did draw a diagram of where the muddy area was, he was able to do so only after he had fallen into it and been forced to search for footing so he could climb out. Similarly, while the coworker may have been able to confirm the mudhole’s location, he was present at the scene of Wilson’s accident, checked on Wilson when he detected trouble and had been told what had happened. Even at that it was still difficult for him to see where the mud was located. According to the coworker, it would not really have been possible for him to have noticed the muddy hole if he "didn’t actually walk in that area and get in it.” Nothing in the record suggests that these witnesses could have provided the details they did prior to the experiences they had. Accordingly, the import of their testimony is not that the location of the hole was impossible to observe, as MoPac tries to characterize it, but simply that it could not be identified visually by workers who did not already know where it was. There is nothing inherently improbable in such a claim, nor does such a claim alter the conclusion that Wilson was not contributorily negligent. MoPac next argues that Wilson could have protected himself by waiting to jump off the train at a spot that was dry. This argument has no basis in the record and completely overlooks the reality of the situation in which Wilson was working. Climbing down into wet ballast violated no rule of the railroad, and it was unavoidable. Testimony established that the entire area was saturated from 24 hours of rain. For all we know from this record, Wilson may have had to travel all the way back to St. Louis, his point of origin, to find a place sufficiently dry to enable him to jump off the moving train without hitting an area of mud or standing water. I note, moreover, that because of the rain, Wilson had walked through a considerable amount of water-covered ballast while working on the train. Wilson had absolutely no basis for suspecting that this muddy area was in any way different from any of the others he had negotiated without incident. Nothing in Wilson’s experience that day could have alerted him to the risk, nor was there anything in his past experience at the quarry that should have put him on notice that what he was doing might not be safe. The failure to discover a danger when there is no reason to apprehend one is not contributory negligence. Paluch v. Erie Lakawanna R.R. Co. (3d Cir. 1968), 387 F.2d 996, 999. An equally untenable argument raised by MoPac is that Wilson might have averted injury had he walked alongside the train on the east side of the tracks, where the mudhole was located, before beginning work. Because the muddy area was undetectable to those unaware of its location, the only difference this precaution would have yielded is that Wilson would have stepped into the hole rather than dropped down into it. Either way, he would still have had to struggle to extricate himself from the mud, and that is precisely what produced his injuries in the first place. MoPac seeks support for its position in Uhrhan and its progeny, but that case is distinguishable. In Uhrhan, a railroad employee injured his knee when he inadvertently tripped over some discarded wire while walking alongside a train at night during switching operations. This court held that it was not error for the circuit court to instruct the jury on the injured employee’s contributory negligence because the employee knew that the railroad no longer hired workers to clear debris from alongside the tracks, and the jury could have found that the employee should have surveyed the area for himself before beginning work and could have used his lantern to check for tripping hazards before walking beside the train, a precaution he admittedly did not take. For the reasons I have just discussed, the situation before us today is fundamentally different. Unlike the injured employee in Uhrhan, Wilson did keep a proper lookout. He observed applicable safety rules and checked carefully before he stepped off the train. Because the hazard was undetectable to those who did not already know its location, there was simply nothing more he could have done. As a matter of law, it is not contributory negligence for an employee to fail to observe something that is not visible. Counsel for Wilson correctly observes that employees cannot be expected to possess X-ray vision. The circuit court should therefore have refused to submit the question of contributory negligence to the jury. (See Borough v. Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Ry. Co. (8th Cir. 1985), 762 F.2d 66, 69 (trial court correctly refused to instruct on contributory negligence where there was no evidence that employee injured while stepping off train acted carelessly or stepped off improperly).) The only remaining question is whether that error entitles Wilson to a new trial. As the majority mentions, the jury ultimately returned a verdict in favor of MoPac on count II. MoPac contends that in order to have done so, the jury must have concluded that Wilson’s injuries were not caused by any negligence for which MoPac was responsible. Accordingly, the railroad asserts, the jury never reached the issue of Wilson’s contributory negligence, and any error in instructing the jury on that issue was harmless. While MoPac cites some appellate court decisions which adhere to this view in common law tort actions, the Federal courts have rejected this line of reasoning in FELA cases such as the one before us today. Acknowledging the practical realities that accompany the use of juries, the Federal courts have noted that jurors may not understand the statutory comparative negligence scheme that applies under the FELA even when properly instructed, and when a general verdict is returned against the plaintiff, a court cannot ascertain whether the jury correctly applied the applicable law. For this reason, the Federal courts have held that where, as here, there is no evidence from which a reasonable person could find an employee contributorily negligent, submitting the issue of contributory negligence to the jury is not harmless. A new trial on all issues is required. (Wilson, 670 F.2d at 784-85; see Birchem, 812 F.2d at 1049 (reversible error to give contributory negligence instruction if defendant fails to produce evidence of the plaintiffs lack of due care).) Although not binding on this court, I consider this to be the better-reasoned view. The appellate court was therefore correct in granting Wilson a new trial on count II of his complaint. Accordingly, I dissent. CHIEF JUSTICE BILANDIC and JUSTICE FREEMAN join in this dissent.