Court Opinion

ID: 9732863
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:40:26.577239+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:35.664778
License: Public Domain

*309Hammond, J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion.
If I had been a juryman I might well have reached the same result the court did in this case at the end of the same ratiocinations availed of by the majority. I have not been persuaded by the majority opinion, nor have I been able to persuade myself as an appellate judge, that there is not evidence in the record which would have permitted me as a juror properly to have found that the transit company bus entered the intersection on a red traffic light and I am, therefore, constrained to dissent.
If the testimony most fairly favorable to the appellees is reviewed, the jury could reasonably have found the following.
The bus driver, going south on Maryland Avenue, pulled in towards the pavement ten feet north of Mt. Royal Avenue in anticipation of picking up a passenger usually there. Seeing she was not there, he looked at the light which, he says, was then green. The speed of the bus was then fifteen miles an hour and the driver stepped on the gas to get across the intersection. Then the accident happened “so fast.” The driver applied his brakes five feet north of the center strip or about thirty-five or thirty-six feet south of the north curb line of Mt. Royal Avenue. The point of impact, as determined by the policeman, was forty-eight feet south of the north curb line or twelve or thirteen feet beyond the point of application of the brakes. The bus pushed the Cavan car sideways for a distance of twenty feet south (as the rub marks measured by the policeman showed) and the bus and the car, in contact, came to rest at about the southwest curb line of Maryland and Mt. Royal Avenues, some thirty-three feet from where the brakes were first applied.
Mrs. Cavan and Mr. Cavan both testified the light was green for the Cavan car when it entered the intersection. If their testimony be given no more weight than the majority gives it (and I think Mrs. Cavan’s testimony that she stopped her car two or three car lengths west of Maryland Avenue and that the light was green for her when she was three or four feet west of Maryland Avenue and when she went into the intersection, remained essentially unimpaired), there remains the flat, explicit and unshaken testimony of Mr. Gentry, the passenger *310in the Cavan car: that while the car was at rest two car lengths west of Maryland Avenue after discharging Mr. Cavan, the light was red for Mt. Royal Avenue traffic; that while the car was still motionless he looked up and saw the light had changed to green; and that thereupon he said to Mrs. Cavan “let’s go” and the car started up and went into the intersection on the same green light. Some seventeen feet from the west curb line of Maryland Avenue it was struck by the bus.
If the jury accepted the evidence most favorable to the appellees, it would have found — from (a) the bus driver’s testimony that he accelerated from the fifteen miles an hour he was going ten feet north of the intersection in order to cross the intersection and (b) the fact the bus went twelve or thirteen feet under brakes before impact (while the car was not, apparently, braked at all) and then pushed the car sideways for twenty feet —that the bus was going at a much faster rate of speed than the car. Similarly, it could have found that the Cavan car went from a standing start some fifty-two or fifty-three feet while the bus was going but forty-eight feet. The speed of the Cavan car could have been found from the testimony not to exceed fifteen miles an hour. Since the light was already green before the car started, it would have taken at least some three seconds for the car to travel the fifty-two or fifty-three feet to the point of impact. At fifteen miles an hour the bus would have gone sixty-six feet in those three seconds, at twenty miles an hour, eighty-eight feet, and at thirty miles an hour, one hundred thirty-two feet. If the police testimony as to the point of impact (and the pushing of the car sideways for twenty feet) is believed and the Gentry testimony is believed, the bus had to have been well back of the north curb of Mt. Royal Avenue when the light turned red against it, and to have entered on the red. Whether the transit company driver was negligent was for the jury to determine and its determination fairly could have been that he was. Campbell v. State, 203 Md. 338; Cogswell v. Frazier, 183 Md. 654. Cf. Eastern Contractors v. State, 225 Md. 112, 121.