Court Opinion

ID: 9627975
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:02:09.984766+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:54.206176
License: Public Domain

ZLAKET, Chief Justice,
specially concurring.
I am puzzled by the majority’s desire to perpetuate a jury instruction that is admittedly of marginal value but has such enor*292mous potential for harm. In my opinion, today’s decision prolongs a decades-old controversy surrounding the “sudden emergency” doctrine and provides little added guidance to Arizona’s trial judges. While my colleagues’ attempt to narrow the use of the instruction is laudable, I would eliminate it altogether and bring to a close the chapter on this anomalous subject.
To say that the sudden emergency instruction should be confined to “the case in which the emergency is not of the routine sort produced by the impending accident but arises from events the driver could not be expected to anticipate,” ante at 291, 942 P.2d at 450, is not helpful. In fact, while that language does little more than track the instruction itself, it is likely to spark a new round of endless debate about the differences between the “routine” and the unexpected.
Moreover, today’s resolution fails to address the essential flaw in the instruction— that it overemphasizes and tends to accord independent status to what is but one of many elements in every negligence analysis. If drivers cannot “be expected to anticipate” certain events, they are by definition free from negligence. Standard instructions, particularly when supplemented by oral argument of counsel, should be more than sufficient to convey this idea without having a trial judge specifically suggest that one party might be excused because he or she faced an “emergency.”
Much has been written on this subject. Nothing more need be said. I simply agree with those jurisdictions that have discarded the sudden emergency instruction as unwise and unnecessary. I am also unpersuaded by the majority’s attempt to distinguish this charge from the “sudden appearance” instruction that we rejected in Rosen.
However, because the instruction in question has not yet been specifically disapproved in Arizona, and appears to have been harmless under the particular facts of this case, I am unwilling to say that the trial judge abused his discretion. I therefore concur in the result.