Court Opinion

ID: 9635162
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 13:39:52.697614+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:00:12.868309
License: Public Domain

Hammond, J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion.
The outrageous conduct of the speeding drunken driver who snuffed out the life of a wife and mother on a summer night in a peaceful little Maryland town before the horrified eyes of her husband, seemingly made it impossible for the jury to find that the victim had contributed to her fate by her own carelessness. The feelings of the jury would seem to be reflected in the words of the foreman, when the jury came in and the court clerk asked how they had found. The foreman replied: “We find the defendant, Mr. Simpler, guilty.”
On the motion for judgments notwithstanding the verdict, Judge Carter found that “The undisputed evidence in the case” shows that Mrs. Boyd either “did not remain constantly alert to approaching traffic or, if she saw a car approaching 350 feet away, she did not guard against being struck by it” and, therefore, “was contributorily negligent as a matter of law.”
I have not been persuaded by counsel or my colleagues that the trial judge did not correctly perform his judicial duty by granting the motion. Contributory negligence has been long established in the law. That aspect of it which may be characterized as the assumption of risk was part of the Roman law. The opinion in the early leading English case on contributory negligence, Butterfield v. Forrester (K. B. 1809), *13711 East 60, 103 Eng. Rep. 926, regarded as a settled rule that a plaintiff who by his own conduct, in conjunction with that of the defendant, has brought harm upon himself cannot recover. The routine acceptance by the legal profession of these statements as conclusive negatives the thought that the idea was new.
Contributory negligence has remained theoretically strong and unimpeached as part of the law of Maryland. From time to time it has been urged that it be replaced by the rule of comparative negligence or by the rule of payment of restricted compensation to one injured without regard to liability, and it has sometimes been suggested that the verdicts of juries, and even the decisions of courts, have reflected the influence of these concepts. It would be surprising if they had not in very hard cases.
In the hard case before us the negligence of the defendant was gross and inexcusable. Nevertheless, the conduct of Mrs. Boyd to me also was grossly careless and defeated recovery under the controlling rule of contributory negligence. She stationed herself almost in the middle of the main street of the town with her back to traffic, looking neither to right nor left, and carried on a conversation with the occupant of a standing car. The street was twenty-one feet wide and had no shoulders as such. On each side traffic had worn a path in the vegetation, said by the State trooper and the driver of the car to whom Mrs. Boyd was talking to extend two feet from the street. The testimony does not with certainty disclose how far to the right the parked car was standing, but at least four feet and probably more of it remained on the paved surface. Mrs. Boyd was a foot or a foot and a half from the car towards the center of the street. Without question she was blocking the half of the street in which she stood. To pass her, a car travelling in the direction the parked car faced would have to go over into the other half of the street. Her presence in the street, unheedful of traffic, was an invitation to the disaster that occurred. If, as she should have expected, cars approached from opposite directions or one came from her right as did the defendant, she would have been faced with the urgent necessity of either going back whence she had come *138across traffic or of going behind or around the parked car. Any such sudden maneuver, in the face of an emergency which she herself had created, would have been dangerous. In this day and age traffic can be expected at any time on any paved street, and fast and careless drivers are not more rare in small towns than elsewhere.
The doctrine of contributory negligence throws on the individual the primary burden of protecting his own interest and safety. The law regards it as unfair that any man should be required to take better care for others than such persons are bound to take of themselves. To hold that, where the only wrong alleged is the defendant’s failure to take care for the plaintiff’s safety, the plaintiff’s own failure to protect himself debars him from recovery, is but a logical extension of the conception underlying consent and voluntary assumption of risk—that the plaintiff can ask from others no higher respect for his rights than he himself pays to them. “Contributory negligence defeats recovery because it is a proximate cause of the accident which happens, but assumption of the risk defeats recovery because it is a previous abandonment of the right to complain if any accident occurs.” Warner v. Markoe, 171 Md. 351, 360. What Mrs. Boyd did, and did not, do seems to me, as it well may have to the trial judge, to be the equivalent of assuming the risk.
Certainly, her acts and omissions must have been contributory negligence as a matter of law under Campbell v. Jenifer, 222 Md. 106, and Henderson v. Brown, 214 Md. 463 (in both of which the pedestrian-plaintiffs rather than the driver-defendants appeared to be intoxicated), and under Martin v. Sweeney, 207 Md. 543.
I think the judgments notwithstanding the verdicts should have been affirmed.