Court Opinion

ID: 9762446
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:23:52.158347+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:34.425051
License: Public Domain

NUGENT, Chief Judge,
dissenting.
I concur with the majority opinion in parts II and III and with the result reached by the majority in part IV. I must respectfully dissent, however, from part I in which the majority holds that no cause of action lies for the plaintiffs’ claim of negligent assistance.
I.
As the majority correctly observes, no Missouri case has recognized a cause of action for negligently assisting a drunk driver. Nor has any Missouri court declined to recognize such a cause of action. Missouri cases do hold, however, that reasonable anticipation of danger constitutes an essential element of actionable negligence, and whether negligence exists in a particular situation depends on whether or not a reasonably prudent person would have anticipated danger and provided or guarded against it. Scheibel v. Hillis, 531 S.W.2d 285, 288 (Mo.1976) (en banc), citing Hodges v. American Bakeries Co., 412 S.W.2d 157, 162 (Mo.1967) (en banc), and Price v. Seidler, 408 S.W.2d 815, 822 (Mo.1966).
In support of its decision, the Scheibel court quoted the provisions of § 302B of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, comment e, Note D. There the Restatement provides that a reasonable person must anticipate and guard against the intentional or criminal misconduct of a second person he brings into contact with third persons where the first person knows or should know the second person “to be peculiarly likely to commit intentional misconduct, under circumstances which afford a peculiar opportunity or temptation for such misconduct.” Under the Supreme Court’s decision in Scheibel, that statement succinctly expresses the prevailing rule of law in Missouri.
In Scheibel the plaintiff alleged that defendant Betty Hillis, despite knowing of Joyner’s violent propensities, told him of the location of her loaded shotgun (which she kept as protection against Joyner), with the consequence that Joyner took the gun and shot plaintiff Scheibel. The court held that one has a duty “ ‘to prevent injury to such persons as may, within the range of reasonable probability, be exposed to injury’ from an indiscreet and reckless party with a firearm.” Id. at 288.
Ms. Goffs’ making available to Mr. Kes-ler his car keys and his car created a situation as fraught with danger to third persons as did Ms. Hillis’ making available a loaded shotgun to a violent person. Her admitted knowledge that Mr. Kesler appeared “obviously drunk” and “clearly unfit to drive” created in her a duty to exercise ordinary care in dealing with him, ordinary care constituting the legal standard by which courts generally determine whether a person has acted negligently. Fowler v. Park Corp., 673 S.W.2d 749, 755 (Mo.1984) (en banc); De Mariano v. St. Louis Pub. Serv. Co., 340 S.W.2d 735, 743 (Mo.1960). In this situation, especially where Ms. Goff knew of Brunswick’s policy to prevent drunken patrons from driving, ordinary car required that she do nothing to aid her employer’s drunken customer to enter and drive his car away after he had shown an intent to drive.
Thus, she committed a breach of her duty when, knowing the danger that Mr. Kesler would immediately pose to pedestrians and other drivers, she complied with his request for a coat hanger to unlock his car doors.1 Nothing distinguishes this case *106from Scheibel, supra, where the Supreme Court imposed on a defendant the standard of ordinary care and thus a duty not to assist another where the defendant may reasonably anticipate that such assistance will expose third persons to injury. Indeed, the court there, following Charlton v. Jackson, 183 Mo.App. 613, 167 S.W. 670, 671 (1914), found a duty “to prevent injury to such persons as may, within the range of reasonable probability, be exposed to injury” from an indiscreet and reckless person. (Emphasis added.)
The majority holds that the legislature’s abrogation on September 28, 1985, of the dram shop keeper’s liability recognized in Carver v. Schafer, 647 S.W.2d 570 (Mo. App.1983), signalled an end to any such liability to third parties arising from the conduct of intoxicated drivers. Therefore, the majority reasons, we may not contradict the legislatively mandated public policy by imposing upon a defendant liability for aiding an intoxicated driver to drive.
Under the common law, a dram shop keeper could not be held liable for injuries to third persons caused by an intoxicated person to whom the shop keeper had furnished alcoholic drinks. Parsons v. Jow, 480 P.2d 396, 397 (Wyo.1971); Garcia v. Hargrove, 46 Wis.2d 724, 176 N.W.2d 566, 568 (1970); Carr v. Turner, 238 Ark. 889, 385 S.W.2d 656, 657 (1965); Belding v. Johnson, 86 Ga. 177, 12 S.E. 304, 305 (1890); Waller’s Adm’r v. Collinsworth, 144 Ky. 3, 137 S.W. 766, 777 (1911).
Section 537.053, which the majority opinion applies and construes, provides in its pertinent parts as follows:
1. Since the repeal of the Missouri Dram Shop Act in 1934 ..., it has been and continues to be the policy of this state to follow the common law of England ... to prohibit dram shop liability and to follow the common law rule that furnishing alcoholic beverages is not the proximate cause of injuries inflicted by intoxicated persons.
2. The legislature hereby declares that this section shall be interpreted so that the holdings in [certain] cases ... be abrogated in favor of prior judicial interpretation finding the consumption of alcoholic beverages, rather than the furnishing of alcoholic beverages, to be the proximate cause of injuries inflicted upon another by an intoxicated person.
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Nothing express or implicit in the 1985 legislation supports the majority’s reasoning. We must distinguish between the act of the dram shop owner “furnishing alcoholic beverages” (declared by the 1985 enactment not to constitute the proximate cause of injuries to third persons by intoxicated persons) and the totally independent act of the dram shop owner in assisting a drunk person to drive his car, in this case, indeed, to commit a crime. See § 577.010 (driving while intoxicated a class B misdemeanor) and § 577.012 (driving with excessive blood alcohol content a class C misdemeanor).
The majority opinion concludes from the General Assembly’s abrogation of dram shop liability for furnishing alcoholic beverages something more than the legislation by itself justifies. The legislative readoption of the old common law dram shop rule has nothing to do with other acts of the shop keeper. If the majority opinion is correct, the following case could occur: An obviously intoxicated man enters a tavern; the bartender serves him no alcoholic beverages but does hand him a loaded shotgun although the bartender knows the man to have violent propensities. The man soon after shoots a third person. Under the majority’s reasoning, the third person would have no cause of action against the bartender and the tavern owner. In the Scheibel ease, according to the majority’s view, had defendant Hillis operated a dram shop when she gave Joyner access to the loaded shotgun, the dram shop rule readopted in 1985 would have shielded her from liability. Clearly, the Missouri general Assembly did not intend such an absurd result.
The problem arises not from the legislation but from the failure to recognize the *107distinction between furnishing drinks (deemed not to be a proximate cause) and the act of assisting a drunk to drive his car on the highway. Whether or not the latter conduct proximately caused injury to the third party is essentially a question of fact and should be left to the jury.
One cannot deny that in the nature of things both the furnishing and the consumption of alcoholic beverages cause the consumer to misbehave. The question becomes one of proximity or remoteness of the causation, not whether causation existed. For various policy reasons, some good and some questionable, the old common law and the recent legislation concur in declaring that, in any event, the furnishing of alcoholic beverages constitutes only a remote cause that will not support liability. That notion has nothing to do with plaintiffs claim of negligent assistance.
The majority has not demonstrated that the legislative abrogation of dram shop liability necessitates or even hints at a denial of a negligent assistance claim based upon helping a drunk to drive. Assuming ar-guendo that the legislature indeed silently intended to preclude that type of liability, the majority’s argument nevertheless fails for want of logical consistency. In Lambing v. Southland Corp., 739 S.W.2d 717, 718-19 (Mo.1987) (en bane), the Supreme Court held that the legislative abrogation did not apply retrospectively and thus, if the accident had occurred between February 8, 1983, and September 28, 1985, an action for dram shop liability would lie. In following Lambing, the majority correctly reasons that since Ms. McAlister’s collision occurred on April 12, 1985, nearly six months before the abrogation of dram shop liability, an action under the dram shop rule would lie. Thus, in addressing the issue of dram shop liability, the majority has, as it must under Lambing, recognized and adhered to the public policy existing during the short-lived Camelot of dram shop liability in Missouri. If, as the majority supposes, the abrogation of the dram shop liability established a new public policy, as it certainly did, it became effective on the date of its enactment, September 28, 1985, not before.
In addressing the separate issue of negligent assistance, however, the majority views the question from the time period that began when the legislature abolished dram shop liability. The majority has placed itself in two time periods when addressing two issues arising from the same incident but does not explain why we should view the two liability questions from the standpoint of different time periods. In effect, the majority has denied retrospective application of the abrogation of dram shop liability when addressing the dram shop keeper’s liability for furnishing alcoholic beverages, but has allowed that abrogation to apply retrospectively as applied to liability based on a distinct and separate theory of negligent assistance. Neither logic nor the law will tolerate that.
II.
I concur with the majority’s result, but not with its reasoning in Point IV. The majority answers Brunswick’s argument that the trial court erred in receiving into evidence gruesome photographs of the accident scene with the notion, now prevalent in Missouri decisions, that “[t]he photographs were gruesome because the accident was gruesome.” This answer, however, begs the fundamental question raised: Does the probative value of the evidence outweigh its inflammatory effect? If it does, then, gruesome or not, the court in its discretion may admit the photographs. Otherwise, the trial court must exclude the evidence. Anderson v. Burlington N.R.R. Co., 651 S.W.2d 176, 183 (Mo.App.1983), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1116, 106 S.Ct. 1974, 90 L.Ed.2d 657 (1986). See also Dudeck v. Ellis, 399 S.W.2d 80, 96 (Mo.1966). Reviewing courts must never abandon, as they seem poised to do, their duty to review evidentiary questions regarding the admission of photographs. To do so would entail the abandonment of a bedrock principle of our jurisprudence: that triers of fact must base their decisions not upon passion or emotion but upon unimpaired reason.
For example, courts may receive into evidence photographs of a person’s injuries when they help explain how the injury occurred or serve some other necessary ex*108planatory purpose. Gooch v. Avsco, Inc., 337 S.W.2d 245, 252 (Mo.1960); Golian v. Stanley, 334 S.W.2d 88, 94 (Mo.1960). Where, however, photographs show gross disfigurement, Anderson, supra, or embellish the injury, Faught v. Washam, 329 S.W.2d 588, 600 (Mo.1959), trial judges must exclude them.
Here, the photographs did not accentuate the condition of the cars after the wreck. They resemble photographs seen daily in newspapers. Indeed, they could not conceal the terrible impact of the accident. The front half of Ms. McAlister’s car resembled an accordion and the photographs demonstrated that the impact must have caused the steering wheel in her car to crush her. The photographs of the car did nothing to embellish the scene, and Judge Hutcherson correctly excluded truly horrific photographs of Ms. McAlister’s body after the wreck. The admitted photographs served a reasonable explanatory purpose, and thus the trial court did not err in admitting them.

. At trial, Ms. Goffs’ friend, Debbie Yazell, Contradicted her, testifying that no one accompa*106nied Mr. Kesler into the building when he returned to request the hanger. Thus, the jury could believe Ms. Yazell’s testimony and from it conclude that Ms. Goff knew that no one other than Mr. Kesler would drive his car.