Court Opinion

ID: 9572267
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:40:13.990755+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:32:12.478488
License: Public Domain

Justice Carlton
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent for the reasons stated by the Court of Appeals, 57 N.C. App. 114, 290 S.E. 2d 794 (1982). I disagree with the majority which holds that this was not an experiment. The truck was placed 1,000 feet down the city street so the jury could hear the siren from and during the truck’s travel over that distance. The applicable statutes set out 1,000 feet as the minimum distance over which the siren must be heard. The activity at issue certainly appears to be an attempt to conduct an experiment and, as the Court of Appeals explains, the requirement that an experiment be made under conditions “substantially similar” to those prevailing at the time of the occurrence at issue clearly was not met here.
The majority concedes that this evidence may have been prejudicial to plaintiff and I certainly agree. It is, I think, a matter of common knowledge that the same sound emanating from the same source may be heard with a different intensity in different settings. Indeed, according to plaintiffs brief, an expert witness stated in a written report submitted in support of plaintiffs motion for a new trial that the “sound heard by the jury could have been four or more times greater than the acoustic in*438tensity that could have been heard by the driver of the vehicle that struck the fire truck.”
I vote to affirm the Court of Appeals.
Chief Justice BRANCH joins in this dissenting opinion.