Court Opinion

ID: 9736462
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:57:40.335779+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:27:06.847590
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Jones:
In affirming the judgment n.o.v. for the defendant, this court has viewed the evidence in the light most favorable to the defendant contrary to what Mr. Justice Linn appropriately referred to as “the familiar rule” which “requires that the court consider the evidence *254in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, resolving all conflicts in his favor and giving him all favorable inferences of fact reasonably dedncible from the evidence” : Bartleson v. Glen Alden Coal Company, 361 Pa. 519, 521, 64 A. 2d 846. No rule has been reiterated or applied more frequently. The error of the decision in the instant case results directly from accrediting (as “irrefutable”) oral testimony for the defendant which, on the motion, should have been rejected: Ashworth v. Hannum, 347 Pa. 393, 395, 32 A. 2d 407. Yet, such is the manner in which the plaintiff’s decedent is found guilty of contributory negligence as a matter of law.
Of the witnesses produced by the plaintiff, only one was a witness to the happening of the accident in suit, namely, the guest passenger who was sitting on the front seat of the automobile beside Mrs. Toenges, the plaintiff’s decedent, who was driving. Mrs. Toenges died from her injuries shortly after the accident without having regained consciousness. Even at the risk of some repetition, it is important first to isolate .the evidence appearing in the plaintiff’s case.
About 4:15 P.M. on a bright, clear day in early March, the defendant’s tractor-trailer was parked in the center of the right-hand (westbound) paved lane of a divided traffic highway, the general direction of which was east and west. The truck was parked just over the crest of a hill, the highway in that locality curving to the left (looking westward) as it lay up over the hill and down the other side. A short distance west of the brow of the hill, the highway was intersected on its north side by a road named Keenan Drive. The parked truck was heavily laden with lumber which protruded about four feet over the rear end which, in turn, was approximately at the middle of the entrance to Keenan Drive. The paved portion of the highway was ten feet in width; it was not possible for a car to pass around the parked truck without going up over the *255six-inch high divider between the traffic lanes. Neither flags nor lights warning of the truck’s immobile status on the highway, which the law required,1 were displayed. The truck was facing down grade and could easily have been allowed to drift a short distance down-hill and almost completely off the highway onto the berm. In fact, that was done shortly after the accident and westbound cars were then able to pass the truck. As the deceased’s automobile approached the top of the hill, the guest, looking straight ahead, was suddenly blinded by the sun for “about” two seconds. The automobile was travelling at approximately thirty miles per hour and slowed down the least bit at the time the passenger was blinded. When she recovered from her blindness, the truck was “about” a car-length directly ahead and a collision with the protruding lumber on the truck ensued causing the fatal injuries to Mrs. Toenges. In view of the time of day, the direction of travel (curving into the southwest at the crest of the hill) and the fact that the sun was shining blindingly to one sitting beside the driver, it is a fair inference that the driver, also, was blinded.
There was no evidence in the plaintiff’s case of any distance at which, it could be arbitrarily said, the truck was visible to an observant driver approaching from the east sufficiently long to avoid an accident; no measurements were given; and there is no evidence that Mrs. Toenges was not looking ahead. Having been killed in the accident, she is presumed to have been exercising due care for her own and others’ safety as she drove her automobile along the public highway. Nor is there anything in the plaintiff’s case destroying the presumption. Whether Mrs. Toenges saw or should *256have seen the truck in time to avoid striking it was an important question of fact which, in the circumstances, was necessarily for the jury. See Young v. New York Auto Carrier Company, 364 Pa. 351, 352 et seq., 72 A. 2d 68, which cannot be distinguished on its facts from the instant case except for the immaterial difference that in the Young case the temporary blindness was from the glare of headlights at night and not from the sun in the daytime. It is as unreasonable as it is unrealistic to hold, as did the learned court below, that being blinded temporarily by the sun’s rays does not relieve against the rigor of the “assured clear distance” rule as does blinding from the glare of headlights at night. Quite understandably, the majority makes no such irrational distinction.
The majority does, however, build a case of contributory negligence, as a matter of law, out of oral testimony adduced in the defendant’s case from an engineering witness who made measurements at the scene six months after the accident. Not only was the credibility of this witness’ testimony for the jury, but the measurements to which he testified cannot rightly be deemed to have established incontrovertible facts. Actually, the measurements were not taken with reference to the fixed location of the truck at the time of the accident; and, in a number of instances, the witness gave relative^ indefinite and confused answers concerning his noting of the distances and locations. Nonetheless, the majority takes it as legally incontrovertible that the truck was parked 170 feet beyond the crest of the hill, that the top of the truck was visible from a point 350 feet eastward and that, at a distance of 200 feet eastward, the entire body of the truck could be seen. For the purpose of taking the measurements, a truck was placed at the entrance to Keenan Drive and pictures were taken from various distances measured from a point marked, for convenience, “zero”. The *257distances thus testified to were far from incontrovertible, even assuming the credibility of the engineer’s oral testimony. Admittedly, the point marked “zero” did not coincide with the position of the truck at its parked location. Point “zero”, as the engineer testified, was “a short distance west of [i.e., beyond] the Keenan Drive entrance.” It necessarily follows that the distances of vision testified to were not the same as from the position where the truck was parked unless the vertical curvature of the highway was regular which it was not, as the testimony explicitly shows.
The majority further conclude that, since the guest was blinded for two seconds, the deceased driver was not blinded for any longer period. From that conclusively assumed inference, the majority deduce that, at thirty miles per hour, the car covered “less than 100 feet” in two seconds and that, inasmuch as a car-length (about 15 feet) remained between emergence from the blind spot and the rear end of the truck, the Toenges car was about a hundred feet from the truck when the blinding sun struck it. Consequently, as the majority reason, in the first hundred feet of the two-hundred-foot distance during which the entire body of the truck was visible according to the defendant’s witness, the deceased could have and should have seen the truck.
To accept these mathematical calculations as conclusive overlooks a number of important factors, not to mention the above-cited discrepancy in the engineer’s testimony. Merely to have seen part of the truck or even nearly all of it over the brow of a hill, on a curve and headed away can hardly be said to have put the driver on notice of impending danger. Could she know that the truck was parked? Might it not be moving? If standing still, might it not be on the berm? And, was Mrs. Toenges blinded by the sun for no greater length of time than her passenger had been which, as *258testified, was, at best, but a variable estimate, — “about two seconds”? These questions and a number of others were matters for the jury. Not rightly could the court assume to answer them as a matter of law. The road being on a curve, the position of the truck at the distance would necessarily be off to the side of the tangential direction of the approaching automobile; and, being over the hill, the truck’s relative position to the highway could not be known until both the truck and the highway at that location were seen together. Even if Mrs. Toenges had seen the truck before the sun blinded her, she was not bound to anticipate that it was blocking or obstructing the highway in violation of the law, as indeed it was: see Buohl v. Lockport Brewing Company, 349 Pa. 377, 379, 37 A. 2d 524; Nelson v. Damus Bros. Co. Inc., 340 Pa. 49, 51, 16 A. 2d 18; Long v. Pennsylvania Truck Lines, Inc., 335 Pa. 236, 239, 5 A. 2d 224; and Shellenberger v. Reading Transportation Co., 303 Pa. 122, 127, 154 A. 297.
To take away summarily the plaintiff-executor’s right in the circumstances to go to the jury on the question of his deceased’s contributory negligence requires evidence so clear, direct and positive as to preclude any difference in the minds of fair and reasonable men as to the decedent’s guilt: Scholl v. Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company, 356 Pa. 217, 224, 51 A. 2d 732. No such evidence is in this case.
I would enter judgments on the verdict 'for the plaintiffs.
Mr. Justice Ladneb and Mr. Justice Chidsey join in this dissent.

 See The Vehicle Code of May 1, 1929, See. 824 (a) and (b), as amended, 75 PS §432 (a) and (b).
The truck weighed in excess of 11,000 pounds.