Court Opinion

ID: 9694496
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 17:44:17.90056+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:02.479780
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno:
No adage has more readily and acceptably passed into current usage than the one which says that a picture is worth a thousand words. The photograph introduced in this case reveals the sidewalk on Locust Street in Ephrata to be made up of concrete slabs some 3 or 4 feet square. At a point adjacent to the trunk of a tree, one of the blocks stands at an elevation of an inch or two above the neighboring one to which it should have been laterally joined for a continuous smoothly walking surface. The pavement follows the gentle slope of the contour of the land and the plaintiff was proceeding from the higher end of the grade to the lower end. One walking in the opposite direction would have seen at once that the offending slab sat on an elevation a couple of inches above the lower slab. Mrs. Freund, however, advancing from the higher level to the lower level could very easily have been deceived by the appearance of the pavement because the drop from one slab to the next was not extreme enough to catch the normal eye of a pedestrian and yet it was deep enough to throw one off one’s balance.
Here we have that situation which so often confronts the most conscientious judge in a courtroom. Should he or should he not on these facts allow the charge of negligence to go to a jury? I am of the opinion that the question was one peculiarly and classically one for a jury to. pass upon.
*40The question narrowed down to this: Was the difference in grade of sufficient depth to constitute a danger and was that difference in grade, at the same time, still not so extreme that it could deceive a pedestrian, thus creating a snare for his unwary feet? We know that we are more apt to detect a fault in a stairway when we are ascending than when we are descending. Careful as we may be, we must take the steps going down a normal looking stairway a great deal on faith because the fall of body weight has often gone too far beyond voluntary control for us to arrest it in the event we should see at the last moment that a tread is out of place, broken or unstable.
The plaintiff in this case, Mrs. Freund, had never trodden this pavement before. She was walking with her host and friend, a Mrs. Barbara Frank who preceded her by a step or two. Mrs. Frank knew the pavement well and, in fact, lived on the same street. Mrs. Freund, the plaintiff, lived in New York and was in the town of Ephrata on her first visit.
The majority opinion points out that there was no evidence to show how long the difference in elevation existed. Here again the picture speaks a thousand words. I-t reveals that kind of a solid firm posture in the elevated slab which could not come from a recent displacement. The poet finds:
“. . . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good-in everything.”
Allowing for extreme poetic license in the last phrase of finding “good in- everything,” we must agree that stones can tell their own story not only in geological narrative but in contemporary history. I believe that the average juror looking at .the -picture here in evidence would have no difficulty in. concluding that -the *41sturdiness, solidity and stance of tlie stone would indicate that it bad been in that position for months at least.
While it is true, as we said in Davis v. Potter, 340 Pa. 485, 487, that “An elevation, depression or irregularity in a sidewalk may be so trivial that the court, as a matter of law, is bound to hold that there was no negligence in permitting it to exist,” yet, as was sagely observed by the Superior Court in Kuntz v. Pittsburgh, 123 Pa. Superior Ct. 394, 401, “there is a shadow zone where such question must be submitted to a jury whose duty it is to take into account all the circumstances. To hold otherwise would result in the court ultimately fixing the dividing line to the fraction of an inch, a result which is absurd.”
I believe that the facts in this case come within that shadow zone and that they should have been submitted to a jury which would have drawn them out into the full daylight of responsibility or non-responsibility on the part of the defendants.