Court Opinion

ID: 9754312
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:55:03.79435+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:51.974606
License: Public Domain

FLANDERS, J.,
concurring.
I concur in the judgment of the Court, but I do so for slightly different reasons than those emphasized by the majority. But for the defendant restaurant’s unexplained failure to produce the incident reports and the daily sanitation checklists that the restaurant customarily prepared in connection with accidents such as occurred in this case, I would agree with the trial justice that, as a matter of law, the plaintiffs evidence was insufficient for a jury to find that employees of the restaurant were responsible for the spill — or, if a patron were responsible, that the defendants received constructive or actual notice of same. At least in the absence of any evidence concerning how long the fluid was present on the floor, the six-inch pool of clear liquid was not so obvious a condition that a reasonable jury could conclude that, before the injured patron slipped and fell, employees of the restaurant either must have noticed it or must have been responsible for creating it in the first place.
Most importantly, no matter how difficult slip-and-fall cases may be to prove, they still have to be proven through evidence of negligence, and not just by relying on rank speculation. And our job on appeal is certainly not to smooth the troubled waters for plaintiffs who otherwise might have a hard time proving their slip- and-fall cases. The bottom line is that, no matter how difficult it may be to prove a slip-and-fall case, we should not allow juries to speculate that, just because somebody slipped and fell, the defendant or its agents must be held responsible. Rather, the evidence must rise to a level that, if credited, a reasonable jury justifiably could conclude that, more probably than not, defendant was responsible for causing the slip and fall.
In this case, but for the application of the spoliation doctrine, I do not believe the evidence was sufficient to allow the jury to speculate about who caused the spill of clear liquid on the floor and how long it was there before the injury occurred. On these facts, it would have been impossible for the jury or any of us to know other than by engaging in rank speculation. Nevertheless, the unexplained absence of the incident report and the daily sanitation checklist gave rise to a permissible inference that these documents contained information that would indicate that the restaurant was at fault for allowing the puddle to *1110remain there on the floor in the middle of an aisle leading to the exit door, or that one of the restaurant’s employees was responsible for creating the spill.
For these reasons, I concur in the decision to reverse the trial justice and remand this case for trial.