Court Opinion

ID: 9754752
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 20:12:10.857874+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:57.154671
License: Public Domain

FLANDERS, Justice,
dissenting.
In reversing the trial justice’s order granting a new trial, the majority concludes that reasonable minds could differ about whether the defendant landlord was negligent in failing to exercise reasonable care for the safety of its tenants and other persons reasonably expected to be on the premises. Respectfully, I do not believe that this is the issue we should be deciding on appeal from the granting of a new-trial motion. Rather, the issue for us on appeal is whether the trial justice, when he exercised his independent judgment in his capacity as a “superjuror” and when he concluded that the jury’s “no negligence” finding was against the fair preponderance of the evidence, “overlooked or misconceived material and relevant evidence, or otherwise was clearly wrong.” Saber v. Dan Angelone Chevrolet, Inc., 811 A.2d 644, 652 (R.I.2002) (quoting English v. Green, 787 A.2d 1146, 1149 (R.I.2001)).
Given that the undisputed evidence at trial established that the lease for the commercial premises where plaintiff worked called for the landlord to supply electrical lighting for common areas — including the halls, stairways, and passageways' — until 10 p.m. on weekday evenings; given that the landlord knew or should have known that the practice of the cleaning crew at the building was to turn off the lights at around 7 p.m. each evening before all the tenants and their visitors had left the building; given that the plaintiff injured herself in a suddenly darkened stairwell before 10 p.m. when someone flipped the light switch off as she was descending four flights of stairs on her way out of the premises on the evening in question; and given that, within a brief time after the accident, the landlord installed a motion-sensor device that eliminated the lights-out problem in the stairwell, it seems to me that the trial justice was entitled to conclude that the fair preponderance — if not the overwhelming quantum — of the trial evidence established that the landlord was negligent because it breached a duty to safeguard the lighting in the stairwell where this plaintiff injured herself and that the jury’s “no negligence” finding was contrary to this evidence. Indeed, given the manual-lighting system that was in place when this accident occurred, anyone could flip off the light switch while tenants and other business invitees were descending up to four flights of stairs in the evening, thereby plunging them into relative darkness and leaving them to stumble *674down the stairs toward the exit. Significantly, after this accident occurred and at relatively scant cost, the landlord installed motion-sensor fighting equipment that solved this dangerous fights-off problem.
In my judgment, the trial justice was entitled to conclude that these circumstances proved that the landlord was negligent in maintaining an unsafe stairwell and that the jury’s no-negligence finding in favor of the landlord was against the preponderance of the evidence, most of which indicated that the landlord was at fault for creating and allowing this defective condition to exist on its premises. It must be remembered that “[t]he granting of a new trial on the ground that the verdict is contrary to the evidence is in every instance a substitution of the conclusion of the justice presiding for a finding of the jury.” Spiegel v. Grande, 45 R.I. 437, 438, 123 A. 560, 560 (1924). But, as this Court pointed out in Barbato v. Epstein, 97 R.I. 191, 194, 196 A.2d 836, 838 (1964), that is scarcely reason enough to warrant a reversal of the trial justice. Thus, given the evidence that supports his conclusion, I cannot say that the trial justice was clearly wrong when he determined that the jury’s no-negligence verdict failed to render substantial justice in this case. As the trial justice found:
“The situation was created by the defendants that would have permitted either another tenant or a worker, an agent of the defendants, to turn off the fights in the hallway while somebody could have been present causing that person to trip, causing that person to fall and causing that person to injure themselves.”
But even if I could join my colleagues in concluding that reasonable minds could differ about whether defendant was negligent and that the evidence in this case reasonably could have supported a verdict for either plaintiff or defendant — particularly in fight of the trial justice’s instruction on comparative negligence — I do not believe we are at liberty to conduct a de novo review of the evidence presented, especially when the trial justice, as here, has conducted the requisite two-step process of evaluating the evidence presented at trial in fight of the jury instructions and of deciding whether the jury’s verdict clearly was wrong because it “fail[ed] to respond truly to the merits of the controversy, fail[ed] to administer substantial justice, and [was] against the fair weight of the evidence.” Izen v. Winoker, 589 A.2d 824, 828-29 (R.I.1991). In these circumstances, our mandate is to give “great weight” to the trial justice’s new-trial decision, refusing to disturb it unless he has “overlooked or misconceived material and relevant evidence or was otherwise clearly wrong.” International Depository, Inc. v. State, 603 A.2d 1119, 1123 (R.I.1992) (quoting Izen, 589 A.2d at 829).
Although the majority states that “there is no case law in Rhode Island supporting the contention that the act of turning off adequately working fights is itself a defect or dangerous condition on the property,” I do not believe that there has to be case law directly on point before a defect or a dangerous condition on property can be labeled as such. The infinite variety of defects and dangerous conditions that can arise on property precludes such a proposition. In any event, case law abounds in Rhode Island and elsewhere establishing that landowners have a duty to maintain their premises in a reasonably safe condition, which includes an obligation to provide adequate illumination of walkways and other means of ingress and egress. See, e.g., Dodge v. Parish of the Church of Transfiguration, 106 R.I. 342, 348, 259 A.2d 843, 847 (1969). Illumination of a stairwell in a commercial building used by tenants at night is not reasonably safe *675when, as here, anyone can turn out the stairwell lights at any time, and when, as here, the management of the building has a policy of allowing the cleaning crew to do so at 7 p.m. even though tenants and their business invitees are allowed to stay until 10 p.m. and the landlord is contractually obliged to light the area during this period. Given these factual considerations, I am hard-pressed to say that the trial justice clearly was wrong when he concluded that this case warranted a new trial because the jury’s no-negligence finding was against the weight of the evidence.
My colleagues, however, conclude otherwise because they “find that the evidence in this case could have reasonably supported a verdict for either the plaintiff or the defendant.”
Respectfully, I have several problems with this reasoning. First, it is not our brief on appeal to “find” whether the evidence in this case could have reasonably supported a verdict for either plaintiff or defendant. That is the trial justice’s job, and, with ample justification, he came to a contrary conclusion. We do not review that decision de novo. Rather, we give it “great weight,” refusing to disturb it unless he has “ ‘overlooked or misconceived material and relevant evidence or was otherwise clearly wrong.’ ” International Depository, Inc., 603 A.2d at 1123. In this case, I do not believe there is any evidence that the trial justice overlooked or misconceived in deciding whether the landlord was negligent. Significantly, the majority fails to identify any such evidence.
Second, because the jury answered special interrogatories, it never reached the question of whether plaintiff was comparatively negligent. ' Rather, the jury was asked to answer the simple question, “Were defendants negligent?” Because they answered this question “no,” the verdict form instructed the jurors not to decide whether plaintiff was comparatively negligent or whether the negligence of defendants proximately caused plaintiffs accident. The jury also never reached the separate questions posed to it about whether plaintiff knew of the existence of a danger and subjectively appreciated the unreasonable nature of any known danger or voluntarily encountered the same.
Thus, I might well agree with my colleagues, if it were my province to do so, “that the evidence in this case could have reasonably supported a verdict for either the plaintiff or the defendant.” But because the jurors answered only the first special interrogatory that was put to them in this case — concluding that defendants were not negligent — they were told not to address the other issues in this case, including plaintiffs comparative negligence, that they otherwise would have been required to address before they could have reached a verdict for either the plaintiff or the defendant. Thus, the trial justice properly confined his new-trial analysis to the evidence on whether defendant was negligent.
For these reasons, I believe the trial justice was entitled to conclude that the jury’s “no negligence” finding was against the weight of the evidence, all of which pointed to the fact that the defendant landlord knew or should have known that its lights-off policy and practice in the stairwell — before all the tenants and business invitees left the premises — created an unsafe situation, and that, therefore, its failure to install motion-sensor lighting before this accident occurred was negligent under the circumstances. For this reason, I would affirm the granting of the motion for a new trial.