Court Opinion

ID: 9444123
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:42:43.718731+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:43.782736
License: Public Domain

PARKER, Chief Judge
(dissenting).
In this case the trial judge directed verdict for the defendant at the conclusion of plaintiff’s evidence on the ground that no negligence on the part of defendants was shown and contributory negligence on the part of plaintiff’s intestate was established. I think that questions of fact were presented by the evidence which under the Seventh Amendment of the Constitution were for the decision of the jury and not the judge. There was evidence to the effect that defendants’ tractor trailer was approaching a yellow blinking traffic light at a road intersection on a four lane highway at a speed of 35 to 40 miles an hour; that the driver did not reduce speed or bring the vehicle under control when approaching the traffic light until he was about to strike decedent, but, without reducing speed, swerved from the outside to the inside lane for the purpose of passing another car and struck the decedent who had crossed both northbound lanes and had reached the middle line of the highway. I think that this was sufficient to take the case to the jury on the question of defendants’ negligence, on the theory that the driver was not exercising due care and keeping a proper lookout in approaching the intersection and the warning traffic light.
I think also, that the question of contributory negligence was one for the jury. Not only does the evidence not establish that decedent’s death was due to his own negligence, but it fails to establish the manner of his death so that anyone can say with any certainty bow it occurred. The driver of the truck, who was the only eye witness that could have thrown much light on the occurrence, was not examined because the directed verdict was granted at the close of plaintiff’s evidence; and the evidence of the witnesses who were examined leaves the whole matter in doubt. Thus, there is evidence of a statement by the driver of the truck, which must be given the effect of primary evidence as an admission by a party defendant, that “he observed the bicycle and then all of a sudden it came out into the road and swung into the side of him”, and “that he was traveling on the right hand side and had pulled out to pass someone and then the bicycle cut into him”. On the other hand, there is the evidence of the witness Corley that decedent had reached the center of the highway and was hit while turning back in the direction from which he had come. Whether he was on the bicycle or was merely walking beside it is left in doubt. Whether he negligently started across the highway and got in the pathway of the oncoming truck, or whether he had reached a place of safety in the center of the highway and negligently started back, or whether, when he was in a place of safety in the center of the highway, he was endangered by the truck’s negligently crossing over to the passing lane and took wrong action in the emergency, or whether, having reached a place of safety in the center of the highway, he was turning for some valid reason and without negligence and was struck because of the negligent operation of the truck-all of these are questions of fact as to which it cannot be said that the answers are so clear that reasonable men could have no doubt about them. Certainly, in the light of the rule that decedent is presumed to have exercised due care for his own safety and that the evidence must be taken in the light most favorable to plaintiff, it does not seem to me that the question of contributory negligence can be decided as a matter of law or that plaintiff can be denied the trial by jury to which the Constitution entitles him on questions of fact.
Decedent was crossing the highway at an intersection where the blinking traffic light required the vehicles using the *878highway to proceed with caution. There was evidence from which the jury could have found that the truck was six hundred and twenty-five feet away when decedent was seen mounting his bicycle to cross. Defendant’s evidence was three hundred feet. Both were mere estimates of the distance and it was for the jury to say which it would accept and, in either case, to say whether decedent was guilty of negligence in attempting the crossing. This has been held a question for the jury where the approaching vehicle was much nearer than 300 feet. Danner v. Cunningham, 194 Va. 142, 72 S.E.2d 354; Rhoades v. Meadows, 189 Va. 558, 54 S.E.2d 123; Overton v. Slaughter, 190 Va. 172, 56 S.E.2d 358; Ebel v. Traylor, 158 Va. 557, 164 S.E. 721; Green v. Ruffin, 141 Va. 628, 125 S.E. 742, 127 S.E. 486; Smith v. Virginia Ry. & Power Co., 144 Va. 169, 131 S.E. 440; Williams v. Kirkman, 232 N. C. 609, 61 S.E.2d 706. As said by this court in Burcham v. J. P. Stevens & Co., 4 Cir., 209 F.2d 35, 38: “Questions of negligence or contributory negligence are ordinarily questions of fact involving the application of the rule of the reasonably prudent man to the facts of the case, and they are not to be decided by applying ‘rules of thumb’ to the evidentiary facts and treating as conclusions of law what are in reality conclusions of fact.”
As to the suggestion that decedent was guilty of negligence if he reached the middle of the highway and then turned back, it is a sufficient answer that it was for the jury to say whether, in the light of the other evidence in the ease, it would accept all or any part of the evidence of the witness upon which this contention is grounded. The direction in which decedent was thrown seems to negative his having been struck by the left side of the truck, as this witness testified; and certainly, if he had reached the center of the four lane highway, he was in a place of safety so far as the truck traveling in the east lane was concerned and had no reason to apprehend that it would attempt to pass another car at an intersection and come over and strike him in the middle of the highway.
On the evidence before us, no one can tell with certainty how this accident occurred. As heretofore stated, I think the evidence was sufficient to take the case to the jury on the question of negligence and while I think that there was evidence of contributory negligence, I do not think that the direction of a verdict on that ground was warranted. If the motion for directed verdict had been overruled, the conduct of deceased might have been so conclusively established by defendants’ evidence as to justify direction of a verdict; but with the burden on the defendants to establish contributory negligence, I do not think that a directed verdict should have been granted on that ground when so much was left in doubt as to decedent’s conduct. This is particularly true in view of the fact that there was testimony that decedent had crossed both northbound lanes of the highway and had reached what should have been a zone of safety and that the truck crossed over from the lane in which it was traveling, struck him in the center of the highway and finally came to rest on the shoulder of the opposite side. It will not do to hold a pedestrian guilty of contributory negligence as a matter of law merely because he is crossing a highway at an intersection; and that is what the directed verdict here amounts to, since there is no evidence establishing with any certainty where deceased was or what he was doing at the time he was struck except that he was in the highway at the intersection.