Court Opinion

ID: 9467054
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:36:42.400708+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:07.421476
License: Public Domain

LAY, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
A new trial is warranted by reason of the trial court instructing on an intervening cause. An instruction on intervening cause is seldom warranted in a negligence suit. It is indeed only an “extraordinary” factual situation which justifies the submission of such an instruction to the jury. Simply because the plaintiff may be guilty of contributory negligence or because the facts might lead the jury to find that plaintiff’s conduct was a contributing cause does not provide a basis for the court to instruct on intervening cause. In any event, it should be clear that such an instruction was prejudicial here, particularly where the facts support the jury’s finding that the defendant was guilty of negligence.
North Dakota law governs the case. In Boss v. Northern Pacific Railroad Co., 2 N.D. 128, 49 N.W. 655 (1891), the court observed:
The intervening cause, to be a shield to defendant, must be such as to actually break all connection of cause and effect between the negligent act and the injury. To be a superseding cause it must alone, and without the slightest aid from the act of defendant, produce the injury, and to be a responsible cause it must be the culpable act of a responsible party.
Id. at 138, 49 N.W. at 658 (emphasis added).
Used in the context of intervening cause foreseeability refers not just to what is usual, customary or to be expected, but whether “[a] court or jury, looking at the matter after the event, and knowing the situation which existed when the new force intervened, does not regard its intervention as so extraordinary as to fall outside the class of normal events.” Restatement (Second) of Torts § 443, Comment b (1965). Hackney’s actions do not, under the circumstances, appear to have been so extraordinary as to have been unforeseeable.
An independent intervening force is one not stimulated by a situation created by the actor’s conduct. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 441, Comment c (1965).
Under the Restatement the relevant inquiry is whether the original act influenced in any way the doing of the intervening act. Id. If the city was negligent at all in not posting or fencing the property, knowing that the gravel pit was likely to attract trespassers, then the city’s negligence had to have had some influence on Hackney’s and Bartels’ actions. The North Dakota Supreme Court has defined an independent intervening cause as one which is so distinct as to sever the connection of cause and effect between the negligent act and the injury. Vick v. Fanning, 129 N.W.2d 268, 271 (1964) (quoting Boss v. Northern Pacific Railroad Co., 2 N.D. 128, 138, 49 N.W. 655, 658 (1891)). See Wolff v. Light, 156 N.W.2d 175 (N.D. 1968). In the instant case it is difficult to see how Hackney’s actions may be said to sever the connection between the original negligence and the ultimate effect, the accident.
In order for the court to instruct on intervening cause reasonable men must be able to differ as to whether the intervening act was not only extraordinary but was unrelated as well. See Moum v. Maercklein, 201 N.W.2d 399, 403 (N.D. 1972).
Here the negligent act is directly related to the plaintiff’s conduct. To hold that a jury could find as North Dakota law requires that the plaintiff’s injury was not aided in the slightest from the acts of the defendant ignores the jury finding that the defendant was negligent. By its finding of negligence the jury necessarily had to find that the city knew of the condition of its land and an unreasonable danger to users was reasonably to be anticipated; that is, the jury had to find that the city had reason to anticipate the kind of occurrence which caused plaintiff’s injury. The conduct of *514the plaintiff “was reasonably foreseeable and was, in the words of Restatement (Second) of Torts § 449, Comment b (1965), “the very event the likelihood of which makes the [landowner] actor’s conduct negligent and so subjects the actor to liability.” See Crohn v. Dupre, 291 Minn. 290, 190 N.W.2d 678 (1971).
It was clear prejudicial error to instruct the jury on intervening cause. The resulting harm here is enormous; although this fact must not govern the legal result, it does point up the injurious consequences which flow from prejudicial error. The giving of the instruction here had the same effect as the court directing a verdict against the plaintiff. I would hold the plaintiff was denied a fair trial; at the very least he is entitled to a new one.