Court Opinion

ID: 9771389
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:41:45.896421+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:29.939682
License: Public Domain

WINTERSHEIMER, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent from the majority opinion because the jury was instructed erroneously on the law applicable to the facts in this case which involved injuries sustained by Perry when struck by a falling limb from a dead tree on the William-sons’ property. The instructions were patterned on Palmore’s Kentucky Instructions to Juries, 2d Ed.1989, Sec. 24.09.
The majority correctly states the applicable part of the rule set out in Section 342 of the Restatement (Second) of Torts which has been adopted by Kentucky. Palmore’s own comment to Section 24.09 says that his instructions are intended to paraphrase the Restatement.
The problem with the instructions in Pal-more, as with that given by the trial judge, is that the jury is told to find what the possessor of the land either knew or should have realized as an ordinarily prudent person in the exercise of ordinary care. See Palmore’s Comment to Section 24.35. What a reasonable person should realize from the facts known to him has nothing to do with exercising ordinary care. A person acts or does not act exercising ordinary care. In the civil realm, the person cannot carelessly not realize something. The state of realization is itself neither careless nor not careless. Consequently the only sensible way a jury could interpret the instruction is that the possessor should have done something to realize the situation better. The possessor was under no such duty.
Perry argues that the trial judge appropriately patterned the instructions on Section 24.09 of Palmore’s Kentucky Instructions to Juries. The Williamsons claim the appellate reversal arose not from using the Palmore treatise, but from using the portion pertaining to a landowner’s duties to an invitee rather than to a licensee.
I believe that the majority of the Court of Appeals panel was correct when they stated that:
The possessor of the land has a duty either to warn a licensee of or to make reasonably safe the dangerous condition if the possessor knows or has reason to know of the condition, and if the possessor should realize that it involves an unreasonable risk of harm to a licensee, who the possessor also has reason to believe will not discover the condition or realize the risk.
Under the instructions given in this case, liability was premised upon knowledge of the deteriorated condition of the tree only, although an additional requirement is that the Williamsons should have realized that the condition of the tree involved an unreasonable risk of harm.
I would affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals.