Court Opinion

ID: 9720482
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:32:22.705747+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:03:36.344532
License: Public Domain

LEVINE, Justice,
specially concurring.
I agree with most of the majority opinion but write specially to address an error by the trial court which is particularly troublesome.
The trial court should have decided the issue of Kirby’s duty under Restatement (2d) of Torts § 413 as a matter of law. Madler v. McKenzie County, 467 N.W.2d 709 (N.D.1991). I agree with the majority that, at some point, the trial court concluded that there was a duty. But the trial court failed to inform the jury that it had ruled that Kirby had a duty to use reasonable care in seeing that the distributor used reasonable care in screening prospective in-home salespersons in order to minimize a foreseeable risk of harm to customers. Instead, the trial court instructed the jury on “peculiar unreasonable risk,” while asking the jury to decide only whether Kirby was “negligent” and whether its negligence proximately caused plaintiffs damages. The jury found Kirby negligent and awarded damages to plaintiff.
Does this omission require a new trial? I agree it does not. I also agree that in-home demonstrations for purposes of sales present a peculiar unreasonable risk under Restatement (2d) of Torts § 413. Unless we were to assume a painfully cynical view that all men were potential rapists, we must conclude that rape by an in-the-home salesman is not an ordinary risk that inheres in the nature of the work and that would arise in the course of the ordinary and usual method of conducting in-home sales, but, instead, is a peculiar and unreasonable risk of physical harm. Compare Peone v. Regulus Stud Mills, Inc., 113 Idaho 374, 744 P.2d 102 (1987) [sawmill operator was not responsible for injury to independent contractor’s employee because risk of falling tree was ordinary danger that arises in the course of work of the independent contractor logging company and not a peculiar risk]; Ortiz v. Ra-El Development Corp., 528 A.2d 1355 (Pa.Super.1987), appeal denied, 517 Pa. 608, 536 A.2d 1332 (1987) [no peculiar risk to employee of masonry subcontractor injured during fall from scaffold because peculiar risk is not an ordinary risk associated with work being done but involves circumstances substantially beyond ordinary ones].
We are particularly vulnerable in our homes, removed from the public eye. Kirby’s national reputation allows its representatives easier entry into our homes than might otherwise be the case. I agree with the majority that allowing an unscreened person into a home to demonstrate a product can produce a peculiar unreasonable risk of robbery, rape or murder, which imposes upon Kirby a section 413 duty of care to the plaintiff.
Because there was a duty under the peculiar risk exception, the jury’s finding that *248Kirby was “negligent” is not reversible error, as Kirby argues. The elements of negligence are duty, breach, proximate cause and damages. In order to have found Kirby negligent, the jury must have found that Kirby breached its duty of care. Even if, as Kirby argues, the jury may only have found “ordinary negligence” and not negligence under section 413, that finding would be sufficient. I say that because the only duty at issue here was Kirby’s duty to use reasonable care to supervise or instruct its distributors to use reasonable care in screening salespersons. That duty is the same under “ordinary negligence” as it is under section 413. The jury’s finding of a duty, in effect, was surplusage, because the trial court did, in fact, determine there was a peculiar-risk-duty. The key element in the jury’s finding of negligence is that there was a breach of Kirby’s duty of care in supervising distributors.
Kirby argues persuasively that the trial court should have decided the issue of Kirby’s duty. Our response is that it did. However, the failure to inform the jury that it had so decided is surely not a paradigm of good trial practice. But, I agree that the verdict is sustainable.
VANDE WALLE, J., concurs.