Court Opinion

ID: 9884871
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-06 03:20:19.432147+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:48:41.602009
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by KRAUSER, Judge,
which MURPHY, C.J., joins.
I concur in the result reached by the majority but I regret that this Court did not take the opportunity presented by this case to modify Maryland’s last clear chance rule and rid it of an odious doctrinal accretion: the requirement that the plaintiff must first prove that the defendant was negligent before the defendant had the last clear chance to avoid injuring the plaintiff.2 It is an “accretion” because it was not part of the last clear chance rule when that rule was first promulgated. It is “odious” because regardless of how helpless the plaintiff, how perilous his predicament, and how blameworthy the defendant’s conduct, the plaintiff cannot recover unless he or she can first show a preliminary act of negligence by the defendant.
This factitious requirement has no intellectual genealogy. It owes its perpetuation to the reflexive application of precedent, not to the reflective application of policy. Indeed it serves no discernible public policy, though it undermines a few, as it exculpates the tortfeasor, no matter how egregious his negligence, while inculpating the tort victim, no matter how slight his fault. This criticism, some will no doubt point out, is also applicable to the doctrine of contributory negligence itself. That may be, but in last clear chance cases this criticism is more telling. For, in sharp contrast to a typical negligence tortfeasor, a last clear chance tortfeasor knows, before acting, who his likely victim is, the probable conse*174quences of his actions, and the helpless state of his victim. Consequently, last clear chance cases often involve an element of callous indifference and sheer recklessness that is missing in ordinary negligence cases.
What is more, this requirement was not an element of the last clear chance rule as that rule was originally conceived. The last clear chance rule was first articulated in Davies v. Mann, 10 M. & W. 546, 152 Eng. Rep. 588 (Ex. 1842), cited in Charles A. Keigwin, Cases on Torts 276-77 (3rd ed. 1929). In that case, the plaintiff left his “fettered” donkey on a public highway. It was then run over by the defendant’s wagon when he ignored the donkey’s peril. But the facts of Davies are best summed up by the case itself:
The plaintiff fettered the fore feet of a donkey and turned the beast into a public road to graze. The defendant’s wagon came down the road at what a witness called a smartish pace and on a slight descent ran down the donkey, which was unable to get out of the way and soon afterwards died from the injuries caused by the collision.
Id. (footnote omitted).
Concluding that the defendant was liable for the plaintiffs loss despite the plaintiffs negligence in leaving a “fettered” donkey on a public road, the Davies court declared:
[Although there may have been negligence on the part of the plaintiff, yet, unless he might, by the exercise of ordinary care, have avoided the consequences of the defendant’s negligence, he is entitled to recover; if by ordinary care he might have avoided them, he is the author of his own wrong.... All that is perfectly correct; for, although the ass may have been ■wrongfully there, still the defendant was bound to go along the road at such pace as would be likely to prevent mischief. Were this not so, a man might justify driving over goods left on a public highway, or even over a man lying asleep there, or the purposely running against a carriage going on the wrong side of the road.

Id.

In finding the defendant negligent, the court did not consider whether the defendant had committed a preliminary act of *175negligence but only whether he had the last clear chance to avoid the accident. Unfortunately, the lesson of this seminal case has been obscured by the adoption of a wholly gratuitous requirement that bears not at all on the question: Did the defendant have the last clear opportunity to avoid the accident but chose not to, knowing the plaintiffs helpless and perilous position?
We are but one of a few states that still adheres to the doctrine of contributory negligence, a doctrine that most other states have found too harsh and pitiless to apply. The last clear chance rule was formulated to reduce, in some small measure, the severity of that doctrine. But, in adopting that rule, we have needlessly limited its application by pointlessly requiring a deserving plaintiff to jump through an additional hoop to have any hope of recovery.
Had we seized the opportunity to recast the last clear chance rule so that it comported with its original formulation, we would not be alone. We would be joining at least one other contributory negligence state, North Carolina. Guided by Davies v. Mann, the Supreme Court of North Carolina in Vernon v. Crist, 291 N.C. 646, 231 S.E.2d 591 (1977) declared:
If defendant had the last clear chance to avoid injury to the plaintiff and failed to exercise it, then his negligence, and not the contributory negligence of the plaintiff, is the proximate cause of the injury. This interpretation of the doctrine is in keeping with the theory behind the original English ‘Fettered Ass Case,’ Davies v. Mann, 10 M. & W. 547, 152 Eng. Rep. 588. ‘The only negligence of the defendant may have occurred after he discovered the perilous position of the plaintiff. Such ‘original negligence’ of the defendant is sufficient to bring the doctrine of the last clear chance into play if the other elements of that doctrine are proved.’ Exum v. Boyles, supra at [272 N.C. 567] 576-77[,] 158 S.E.2d at [845,] 853 [(1968)].
Id. at 596.
The North Carolina court stressed:
*176For the doctrine to apply it must appear ‘that after the plaintiff had, by his own negligence, gotten into a position of helpless peril (or into a position of peril to which he was inadvertent), the defendant discovered the plaintiffs helpless peril (or inadvertence), or, being under a duty to do so, should have, and, thereafter, the defendant, having the means and the time to avoid the injury, negligently failed to do so.’ [Exum v. Boyles, supra at 576, 158 S.E.2d at 853].

Id.

And finally, this wholly unwarranted obstacle to recovery has led our courts to stretch and strain to find acts of preliminary negligence by the defendant, where none exist, but where the injuries of the hapless plaintiff are great and the conduct of the defendant particularly censurable. The creativity displayed by these courts in trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole has been impressive (and, in my view, laudatory) but I hope at some later date will become entirely unnecessary.

. Maryland’s last clear chance rule requires the following elements to be satisfied before a plaintiff can recover: "(i) the defendant is negligent; (ii) the plaintiff is conlribulorily negligent; and (iii) the plaintiff makes 'a showing of something new or sequential, which affords the defendant a fresh opportunity (of which he fails to avail himself) to avert the consequences of his original negligence.' ” Burdette v. Rockville Crane Rental, Inc., 130 Md.App. 193, 216, 745 A.2d 457 (2000) (quoting Liscombe v. Potomac Edison Co., 303 Md. 619, 638, 495 A.2d 838 (1985)).