Court Opinion

ID: 9705615
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 01:13:45.294544+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:12.952149
License: Public Domain

*240Concurring and Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno :
I dissent from that part of the Majority’s Opinion which affirms the action of the lower court in entering judgment n.o.v. in favor of the Pure Carbon Company.
On October 15, 1954, George Daniels, who had been employed by Pure Carbon for over six years, picked up at the plant of the company in St. Marys, a package to take, to the Bradford airport for shipment to one of the company’s customers. A friend, Robert Hnath, accompanied him on the trip which was made in Daniels’ automobile under an arrangement whereby the company' paid him mileage for both trips, that is, to and from the airport. On Daniels’ return from the airport, having dispatched the company’s package in accordance with instructions, he experienced heavy fatigue since he had had little sleep the night before and had risen early that morning. Fearing to succumb to slumber, he turned the wheel over to his companion and then went to sleep. Hnath drove the car in a negligent manner and collided head-on with an automobile, being operated by William J. Muroski and carrying four members of the Muroski family. One of the passengers was killed and the others injured. They brought actions in trespass against Hnath, Daniels, and the Pure Carbon Company and recovered verdicts against all defendants. The lower court entered judgment in favor of Pure Carbon, on the asserted basis that at the time of the accident Daniels was not engaged in the course of his employment and therefore could not delegate company responsibility to Hnath. This Court has affirmed the position of the lower court in this respect.
It is contended by the appellee, the Pure Carbon Company, that once Daniels consigned the Company’s package to the Allegheny Airlines at the airport, his *241responsibility to the company terminated and the company’s responsibility to him ceased. It argues that since this happened on a Saturday afternoon, when the company’s plant in St. Marys, had closed, Daniels was now on his own. This argument ignores a very important and quite obvious circumstance, namely, that since Pure Carbon had sent Daniels to St. Marys on company business, it had to see to it that Daniels got back to St. Marys, where the plant was located and where Daniels made his home. The first man who is shot to the moon will have the right to assume that his sponsors will provide the manner and the means for him to get back to Mother Earth.
Daniels’ engagement for Pure Carbon on October 15, 1954, did not, and could not, terminate until he had returned to St. Marys. During his many years’ employment with Pure Carbon he had made trips, for the company, to points as distant as New York and Pittsburgh. Certainly it could not be contended on behalf of the company, that when Daniels arrived in New York or Pittsburgh his employment ceased and that on his return from those faraway points he was his own boss. On those trips the company would have control over Daniels’ movements until he returned to St. Marys. The fact that Bradford is not as far away from St. Marys as New York does not change the nature of Daniels’ employment and the interchange of responsibility between employer and employee.
It was testified at the trial that Daniels had made at least thirty trips to the airport for Pure Carbon. On occasion he travelled in the company’s car but most of the time he used his own automobile. For the outgoing and return St. Marys-Bradford trip, which consumed in all about two hours and twenty minutes, he was paid so much per hour and eight cents a mile for the use of his car.
*242I do not see bow can there be any doubt whatsoever that when Daniels was returning from the airport to St. Marys he was engaged in furthering his employer’s business. He had a duty to return to St. Marys. He worked in St. Marys. The company would not have tolerated his not returning to St. Marys, the company’s home.
The lower court says, however, that even if it be assumed that Daniels was an agent of Pure Carbon on his return to St. Marys, he could not fasten on the company any responsibility for allowing Hnath to drive his car. In support of the proposition the lower court cites certain cases* and quotes: “The relation of master and servant cannot be imposed upon a person without his consent, expressed or implied. The exception to this rule is that a servant may engage an assistant in ease of emergency, where he is unable to perform the worlc alone” (Emphasis supplied).
After opening the door of the exception, the court slams it shut with the statement that there was no emergency which justified Daniels’ asking Hnath to drive the car. But was there, in fact, no emergency? As I read the record, I find that there was indeed an emergency, an emergency which is the most serious of all possible perils which can confront a motorist on the highway at night. Entering into a skid, feeling one’s car sliding off an embankment, perceiving another car turning into one’s path of travel are all innocuous contingencies in comparison to the peril which was assailing Daniels on his return from Bradford, when, as darkness enveloped the road in shadows, Daniels felt man’s greatest friend, but, at the wrong time his most mortal enemy, beginning to disable him. Sleep was hammering at his eyelids. And, once a driver’s *243eyes close and his hands fall helplessly from the steering gear, the uncontrolled car bounds forward into the lane paved with death, destruction, and mutilation.
If, upon that return trip to St. Marys, a piece of glass had fallen from the windshield and seriously cut Daniels’ hand, no one would question that this would be a “case of emergency” which would justify his engaging an assistant to complete the journey. If a wound would warrant Daniels’ giving up the Wheel, certainly a threatening state of insensibility would imperiously demand it.
The learned court below, however, says that fatigue and impending unconsciousness did not justify Daniels’ calling upon Hnath to assist him. The court very helpfully suggests that Daniels “could have driven off the road and slept in his car.” There is nothing in the record which indicates that at the time the hammer blow of sleep was about to strike, there was a convenient spot along the road where Daniels could have stopped to enjoy the sleep which knits up the raveled sleeve of care.
The court makes another illuminating suggestion. It says that Daniels “could have gone to a hotel and got a room.” While I am not as familiar with the Bradford-St. Marys Koad as is the learned Judge who wrote the opinion in the court below, I would say that I have travelled that road and I do not recall that the continuity of the drive was disturbed by the great number of hotels flooding the lane of travel with blinding lights and the annoyance of hotel clerks standing by the side of the road urging me to stop to eat, dine, and rest. And if, indeed, there was a hotel somewhere between Bradford and St. Marys, what could have happened to Daniels between the moment he felt the crying need to sleep and the moment he Anally stumbled off the car into the lobby of the hypothetical hotel?
*244With all respect, I would say that the suggestions made by the lower court, as above indicated, are mere refuges along the highway of argumentation and debate and do not offer solid residence for any proposition of law which would absolve the Pure Carbon Company from responsibility for what happened on the road from Bradford to St. Marys when its recognized employee, in a patent emergency, asked a man at his side, and not miles away, to assist him.
And. I would say, with continuing respect, that the reason offered by the Majority Opinion of this Court for exempting the Pure Carbon Company from liability for its employee’s act is no more convincing than that offered by the lower court. The Majority Opinion says that to say “the tiredness of the driver (Daniels) created an emergency which justified the employment of Hnath is an unwarranted distortion of the above mentioned principle and is utterly devoid of merit.” (Emphasis in original). The Majority Opinion says further that this “would permit an employee to take a girl friend or to pick up a stranger for a ride and under any of half a dozen pretexts, permit her or him to drive the employer’s car and thereby make the employer liable for the acts of a total stranger.”
The Majority does not enumerate the “half a dozen pretexts” which would induce the motorist to have his girl friend drive the car, and we cannot speculate on what those pretexts might be. Therefore, no principle of law can be predicated on so nebulous and foggy a hypothesis. Even more shrouded in mystery is the Majority’s suggestion that a motorist would have a stranger drive his car in order to punish his employer with liability. Why?
The Majority says that to have a girl friend or a stranger drive a man’s car under the circumstances indicated “would open wide the door to fraud.” What *245door and what fraud? What has happened to the law of evidence? And what has happened to the deliberations of a jury? Would the court attendants in the imagined situations, which are not too clearly depicted, pass around blindfolds and ear plugs to the jury so that they could not see and not hear what was taking place in the courtroom?
Are we to deny recovery in cases of proved liability, only because of the possibility that in some future day miscreants, imposters and phantoms might conspire to deceive court and jury? Is not the very purpose of a trial to strike at falsehood, rip away pretense, and reveal truth?
No one should be denied what the facts in a given case prove he is entitled to, on the basis that to allow him to recover would mean that an undeserving litigant might some day present a spurious claim. That kind of logic would make a mockery of every court in the land and the whole jury system.
When Daniels felt his eyelids growing heavy he did what every motorist should do — stop driving.
And when the figure of Justice finds her eyelids growing heavy because of the convoluted journeyings of a piece of litigation into many fields of suppositions, conjectures, and hypotheses, she should request that the course of reasoning be brought back to the true road of relevancy between Bradford and St. Marys.
I dissent.

 Corbin v. George, 308 Pa. 201; Tusko v. Lynett, 326 Pa. 449, etc.