Court Opinion

ID: 9865068
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 16:22:11.877081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:37:01.168079
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Bouck,
dissenting.
Until 1931 there was a widespread practice of suing for damages the negligent driver of an automobile in which an injury was suffered by a plaintiff who had been *238merely a guest by way of gratuitous accommodation or favor. As a rule the real party in interest sought to be held liable was not the driver, but some automobile insurance company, and the frequency of such actions threatened a vast increase in the insurance premiums. The General Assembly curtailed the practice by enacting chapter 118 of 8. L. ’31 (’35 C. S. A., c. 16, §371), which provides: “No person transported by the owner or operator of a motor vehicle as his guest, without payment for such transportation, shall have a cause of action for damages against such owner or operator for injury, death or loss in case of accident, unless such accident shall have been intentional on the part of such owner or operator or caused by his intoxication, or by negligence consisting of a willful and wanton disregard of the rights of others. * # *”
The words “willful” and “wanton” are common English words, having a fairly well defined range of meaning. They are in no sense technical terms. There is no occasion for an expert definition of them. In the absence of a legislative definition in the act itself, it is to be assumed that the General Assembly intended ordinary rules of interpretation to apply. That being true, the existence of wilfulness and wantonness in a particular case is a question for the jury to determine. This court has no right to defeat the expressed will of the legislature by whittling down the accepted meaning of terse, commonly used Saxon terms, easily understood. It is not for us to draw in advance an arbitrary line of demarcation according to the individual views of appellate judg-es, to be mechanically applied in relation to evidence concerning which we know nothing.at first hand and have not the slightest fact-finding function. The trial judge, who hears the witnesses and observes their demeanor on the witness stand, may well be trusted to set aside a verdict, and to grant a new trial if necessary, when he as a conscientious presiding officer and as “the thirteenth juror,” deems it a wrong or unrighteous jury decision. Where there is evi*239dence, as there is here, tending to establish what jurors in the persons of average lay citizens would consider wilfulness and wantonness, appellate judges are bound by a jury verdict which has met with the deliberate approval of the trial judge. It is different, of course, when there are prejudicial errors on the legal side, as distinguished from the facts. In such event the appellate court has full power to undo that kind of miscarriage of justice. This is not the case here.
There was evidence in the ease at bar to the effect that plaintiffs’ son was killed because for a minute and a half before the accident the driver of the death car was continually using his right hand to turn on one broadcasting station after another on the car’s radio and that at the same time he was speeding along a generally traveled and used, popular public highway at the rate of fifty-five miles per hour; and that this conduct resulted in the driver’s coming up to within fifty feet of a car in front of him before he noticed it, which he did when a terrified passenger next to him made an outcry. When from any rational standpoint it was practically certain that an attempt to swerve the car would turn the tremendous momentum of eighty-one feet per second into an inevitable instrument of death, as would have been the case if he had gone on and collided with the car in front of him, I respectfully submit that if twelve jurors united in believing the above-mentioned evidence we ought to accept their finding of wilfulness and wantonness, provided the trial court has refused to set the verdict aside. This court’s duty, it seems to me, is then to let the verdict stand.
It is to be noted that there was also before the court evidence of statements made by the defendant himself in which he expressly admitted that the accident had been due to his recklessness and disregard of the safety of his passengers. Moreover, the excluded written and signed statement of the defendant, quoted from by Mr. Justice Young, would have amply fortified the jury verdict. I submit that its rejection was error. The declaration that *240the statement was properly excluded because it contained legal conclusions is, I believe, not sound. While allegations of pleadings are controlled by the principle that mere legal conclusions must be either eliminated or disregarded, I know of no such principle or rule that could practically be applied to statements made by parties, whether in writing or by word of mouth.
The majority opinion cites Millington v. Hiedloff, 96 Colo. 581, 45 P. (2d) 937, to justify its present decision. Under the particular facts in that case the denial of a right of action was correct. Those facts did not require more than giving the ordinary meaning to the language of the 1931 Act. The extended discussion by Mr. Justice Young in the Millington case, while interesting and helpful, is of course dictum. In this class of cases it would be futile to attempt setting once for all the exact limits by which each situation shall be automatically classified either as presenting or as not presenting a good cause of action, just as it would be futile to attempt, for example, an exhaustive or even approximate definition of fraud. After all, it is in each instance a question of fact, and as already stated the language of the statute obviously requires neither construction nor special interpretation. If peculiar facts should ever require one or the other of these, it would be time enough to let the trial court first work out the problem, subject to a proper review by this court, without our seeming to prejudge cases by a general psychological analysis or the application of a supposed all-embracing theory.
The danger and evil of substituting an appellate court for the trial court, which is the only lawful fact-finding body in cases of this kind, are nowhere better exemplified than in the case at bar and in the case of Pupke v. Pupke, 102 Colo. 337, 79 P. (2d) 290.
Believing, as I do, that the verdict of the jury should have been sustained and the judgment of the district court affirmed, I respectfully dissent.
Mr. Justice Hilliard concurs in this opinion.