Court Opinion

ID: 9865294
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:30:44.205038+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:38:22.641869
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Bakke,
dissenting.
I regret my inability to concur in the Court’s opinion, and shall very briefly state my reasons. The opinion reverses the judgment on two grounds: 1. Lack of proof of negligence. 2. Lawson was not at the time of the accident an employee of the Gallagher Company.
*1721. I do not think the court has shown a distinction between the negligence alleged in this case and that in Straight v. Western Light & Power Co., 73 Colo. 188, 214 Pac. 397, cited in the opinion. It strikes me that the statement in behalf of Lawson’s non-negligence could with all propriety have been made in behalf of Straight in that case, and, yet, we held there that Straight was guilty of contributory negligence, as a matter of law. In both cases, the evidence shows that neither employee came in actual contact with the high voltage electric wires. What difference, pray, from the standpoint of negligence, is there between injury caused by “leakage” or “creepage” of the current as in the Straight case, and the “disruptive discharge” of the current occurring in the case at bar. In both cases, the men were warned of the danger, and, if anything, the warning in this case was stronger than that given in the Straight case, yet, Judge Burke says of the warning there: “No more impressive warning of a dangerous condition existing at that time in the vicinity of that structure could have been conveyed.” (p. 191) So much for that.
2. We held in the recent case of Mill v. Fort Collins, 109 Colo. 579, 129 P. (2d) 108, that the City of Fort Collins; being the owner of an excavating machine which it rented with an operator for so much a job, was liable under circumstances strikingly similar to those in the case at bar. I dissented there, but since that case became the law on similar situations, I think we should uphold it for a longer time than a few months.
Ordinarily a few presumptions are indulged in favor of the trial court’s findings on a factual situation; here, apparently, the presumptions and legal questions were all resolved against the judgment.