Court Opinion

ID: 9439074
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:20:38.847354+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:08.476937
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Except for one issue I find myself in full agreement with the majority. Unfortunately the issue — contributory negligence — is dis-positive. If, as I believe, no reasonable jury could find the plaintiff free of contributory negligence, then all the other issues are moot. Accordingly I dissent.
The plaintiff, wife of a U.S. Senator, drove with friends to a lunch at the Shoreham Hotel in honor of the First Lady. Because the parking at the Shoreham was full, she left her friends off there, and went to park her car at the nearby Sheraton Washington. To exit from the parking structure to the hotel proper, she had to pass through the Exit door shown in Exhibit 1 to this opinion (a black-and-white photocopy of Defendant’s Trial Exhibit # 26, a color photograph). On it, perhaps two inches below the door handle, appears a warning sign saying,
CAUTION
WATCH YOUR STEP
with five arrows pointing down.
On the hotel side of the door there is a ramp that appears roughly symmetrical to the one on the garage side. (Plaintiff’s Motion for Partial Summary Judgment as to Liability as to Defendants ITT Sheraton, Sumitomo Life Realty, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, Sheraton Operating Corporation and Woodley Road Associates, Exhibit C.) A person going through the door directly (i.e., pursuing a course perpendicular to the plane of the doorway) would step onto the far ramp. Beyond the area directly aligned with the doorway, the *788edge of the far ramp fell vertically to floor level, so that for anyone who stepped to the side while entering the hotel there was a drop of several inches — the record does not make clear how many — at least at the end of the ramp nearest the door frame. It was this configuration of the ramp, and/or the absence of a handrail, that the jury found negligent. Defendant does not dispute that it could reasonably do so.
Plaintiff described her fall as follows:
I ... opened the door ... with my left hand and my left shoulder and probably my left leg and foot as well, because it was a very heavy door, and pushed open the door and proceeded in with my right foot. My right foot fell off that right side of that ramp and I was catapulted into the metal framework of the [elevator].
Joint Appendix (“J.A.”) 130. In a passage from her deposition read into evidence at trial, she said
I stepped through the doorway expecting there to be a ramp on the other side and my foot just went into — I can only describe it as an abyss.
Id. at 267. According to plaintiffs testimony, she was able to see the “Exit” sign by the door “easily,” and the lighting on the hotel side of the door was “much brighter” even than that. Trial transcript at 1024, 1027.
I do not believe a reasonable jury could have found that someone leaving the parking garage through this exit could have suffered the accident that befell plaintiff if she exercised reasonable care in light of the prominent “Caution” sign. First, a person exercising reasonable care would see the sign, right next to the door handle and in very bold lettering.1 (Plaintiff testified that she did not remember seeing it. J.A. 270.) Plaintiffs counsel evidently assumed the sign’s visibility, arguing instead to the jury that it failed to direct attention to any danger on the other side of the door. Trial transcript at 1107. But this depends on an odd construction of the sign. Counsel’s idea evidently was that it directed the reader’s attention only to hazards before the door, which she could see before she touched it, and perhaps to hazards directly beneath the door, but not at all to hazards just beyond the door. I cannot see how the sign means anything other than for the patron to proceed with caution both as she approaches and as she steps through the door. This includes the first steps she takes on the other side. Of course, under special circumstances a reasonable person might disregard the warning, say if she were pursued by a thug. But plaintiff suggested no such extreme circumstances.
In its recent decision in Poyner v. Loftus, 694 A.2d 69 (D.C.1997), D.C.’s Court of Appeals made clear that in its view proof of contributory negligence as a matter of law is not just a once-in-a-blue-moon event. In Poyner, the plaintiff, legally blind but able to see about six to eight feet in front of him, was on a walkway elevated four feet above the street level and lacking guardrails. Shrubs normally acted as a (modest) barrier to persons’ falling off the walkway, but on the day in question one was missing, as Poyner noticed. Distracted by someone calling out his name, and failing to take the precautions indicated by the absence of the protective shrub, Poyner walked over the edge and suffered injuries. The court found his conduct contributorily negligent as a matter of law. In our case, similarly, plaintiff “failed either to look at all or to look observantly and see what should have been plainly visible.” Poyner, 694 A.2d at 71 (quoting Singer v. Doyle, 236 A.2d 436, 438 (D.C. 1967)).
*789The majority is, of course, correct that negligence and contributory negligence are only rarely established as a matter of law, see Maj. Op. at 786-87 (citing Singer v. Doyle, 236 A.2d 436, 437 (D.C.1967)), and that Poyner wrought no change in District of Columbia law, id. at 787. But Poyner dramatically illustrates the District’s idea of reasonable care and its insistence on real, not rubber-stamp, superintendence of the jury. To be true to the District’s substantive law, which controls our review of the district court’s decision on the motion for a directed verdict, Ferguson v. F.R. Winkler GMBH & Co. KG, 79 F.3d 1221, 1224 (D.C.Cir.1996), we should reverse for failure to grant the motion.
*7904
Exhibit 1
[[Image here]]

. In the color photo contained in the Joint Appendix the sign gives off an iridescent glow, but trial testimony indicates that this may well have overstated the sign’s salience. The black-and-white photocopy appears to cancel that overstatement.