Court Opinion

ID: 9681189
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 07:45:35.688476+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:32.577021
License: Public Domain

STEWART, Judge
(dissenting).
I dissent from the majority opinion because, broadly speaking, it will have the effect of tending to make the owner and builder of improvements under construction on real estate insurers of the safety of young children who trespass thereupon. Then, too, this opinion, if it stands, will extend the attractive nuisance doctrine to limits that are inconceivable in their ultimate implications, whereas the announced policy of this Court has been to restrain instead of expand this doctrine, particularly where the customary use of real property is involved. On this proposition the following language from Goss v. Shawnee Post, etc., Ky., 265 S.W.2d 799, 800, should be noted:
“The tendency of our Court is to restrict rather than to enlarge the attractive nuisance doctrine, Ice Delivery Co. v. Thomas, 290 Ky. 230, 160 S.W.2d 605, and to exclude from its application such things as walls, fences, simple tools and appliances and conditions arising from the ordinary use of property, else the ownership of real estate would become a burden instead of a benefit.”
The majority opinion refers to the structure which young Goben pulled over on himself as “a column”. Actually, it could well be considered as part of a wall, since it forms a necessary component of the front portion of the garage. If it be regarded as a wall, and I believe it should be so classified, such a fact would bring it within the exclusionary language of the Shawnee Post case. Undoubtedly the structure as built falls into the category of those “conditions arising from the ordinary use of property”, with the result that the attractive nuisance doctrine is ruled out as an applicable principle.
I also do not subscribe to the theory that the concrete block structure with bolts protruding therefrom at intervals (a necessary condition incident to the construction of the garage) constituted an invitation to small boys to use them, so as to make appellees liable to appellant who attempted to climb up the bolts and was injured. No Kentucky case is cited to support such a view. On the contrary, a Texas case, Simonton v. Citizens’ Electric Light & Power Co., 28 Tex.Civ.App. 374, 67 S.W. 530, 532, held no recovery could be had by a child who climbed up an electric light pole by means of spikes driven in the pole from a point near the ground up to a point near the top. The child was injured by a fall, and the Court of Civil Appeal of Texas, addressing itself to the attractive nuisance doctrine sought to be invoked there, said:
. “Where the owner makes use of his property as others ordinarily do throughout the country, there is not, in legal contemplation, any evidence from which a court or jury may find that he had invited the party injured thereon, though it be conceded that his property was calculated to, and did, attract him. * * * ”
The opinion attempts to buttress its position that the structure was designed to lure small boys into a hazardous situation with two cases involving stacked lumber and one involving stacked I-beams. In all of these cases, all of them having been decided more than fifty years ago, the materials were placed out in the street where children passed continually or, as in one case, in a lot resorted to as a playground by small boys and girls. In two of these cases (Bransom’s Adm’r v. Labrot & Graham and Louisville R. Co. v. Esselman), the lumber and I-beams, it was emphasized, were piled negligently so that they would reasonably be calculated to become loose *713and fall if children climbed over or upon them. In. the other, although the lumber was found not to have been negligently stacked, the owner of it was held to be guilty of an actionable wrong because liability could attach where “such an object of danger to very young children” was left accessible to them and unguarded in a public street. Attention is also directed to the fact that this last-mentioned opinion is counter to the current view of authority in this jurisdiction, since it allowed a child to recover by reason of falling from an immobile structure. See Fourseam Coal Corp. v. Greer, Ky., 282 S.W.2d 129.
As regards the case at bar, the boy who was hurt was a trespasser at the time he was injured, and he lost his two fingers while attempting in a spirit of bravado to scale a structure that had been erected in the manner usual to the construction of such an object and with proper care as to workmanship.
A case more in line with the one under discussion was Witte v. Stifel, 126 Mo. 29S, 28 S.W. 891, 893, 47 Am.St.Rep. 668. There a seven-year-old boy was killed when a large stone placed over the top of a window frame of a cellar, about three or four feet from the surface of the ground, fell on him when he tried to draw himself up by taking hold of the top of the stone. The latter had not been set in mortar and was loose. In denying a recovery in this case, the Supreme Court of Missouri, after finding that the boy was a trespasser, had this to say about the application of the attractive nuisance doctrine to the facts:
“No inducement or invitation, implied or otherwise, had been held out to him; but for his own amusement he was attempting to draw himself up, by placing his hands upon the stone, which, by reason of the pressure thereon, fell upon him, and killed him. The defendants owed him no duty, except the negative one not to wantonly or maliciously injure him. The deceased had left the sidewalk, and stepped over the hounds and passed the limits to which he was restricted by the street and sidewalk; and therefore his case does not come within the rule which requires one person to so protect a building upon his own premises,-or of which he may be in control, which is dangerous to others, passing along upon a public street.”
The majority opinion takes the view that the builder of the structure should have employed certain security measures in order to protect children who might intrude and play on the structure as young Goben did. To require such a practice would make .building costs, which are mounting skyward by the hour, well nigh prohibitive for the average person. I submit that such a rule should not be laid down -as the law in Kentucky.
While there is some authority holding that the applicability of attractive nuisance or a related doctrine is a question for the jury, I think the better view is expressed in Peters v. Bowman, 115 Cal. 345, 47 P. 598, 599, 56 Am.St.Rep. 106, as follows:
“But the owner of a thing dangerous and attractive to children is not always culpable, and therefore is not always liable for an injury to a child drawn into danger by the attraction * * *. The facts being undisputed, it is the province and the duty of the court to decide, as a matter of law, whether a defendant has been guilty of culpable negligence.” (Emphasis added.)
In the case at bar, the facts were not in dispute in regard to the occurrence of the accident. Under the evidence, the trial judge correctly took this case from the jury and determined as a matter of law no recovery could be had. I would uphold the ruling of the lower court which directed a verdict for the appellees.
I am authorized to state that MONTGOMERY, C. J., and MOREMEN, J., join me in this dissent.