Court Opinion

ID: 9453977
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:31:21.247868+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:54.795001
License: Public Domain

FREEDMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
1 find myself unable to accept the conclusion that a jury could not have found the power company guilty of wanton misconduct. Although Pennsylvania has vigorously enforced its ancient rule that the slightest negligence by a plaintiff which contributes to his injury is an absolute and complete bar to recovery,1 its Supreme Court in the leading case of Kasanovich v. George, 348 Pa. 199, 34 A.2d 523 (1943), adopted the doctrine that plaintiff’s contributory negligence is not a bar to his recovery if the defendant is guilty of wanton misconduct. The principle has now been applied in numerous Pennsylvania cases and has received the approval of the American Law Institute 2 and of Professor Prosser in his leading work on torts.3
In Evans v. Philadelphia Transportation Co., 418 Pa. 567, 574, 212 A.2d 440, 443 (1965), the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania distinguished between willful misconduct in which defendant must have had some actual prior knowledge of the trespasser’s peril, and wanton misconduct in which the defendant is consciously indifferent to the possible risk and quoted with approval Prosser’s description of wanton misconduct: “Wanton misconduct * * * ‘means that the actor has intentionally done an act of an unreasonable character, in disregard of a risk known to him or so obvious that he must be taken to have been aware of it, and so great as to make it highly probable that harm would follow. It usually is accompanied by a conscious indifference to the consequences * * *.’ Prosser, Torts § 33 at 151 (2d ed. 1955).”
Here the power company continued to maintain live uninsulated wires carrying *934800 volts of electricity for fourteen years after the last customer serviced by the wires had ceased to use them. It had not made a visual inspection of the wires for almost four years prior to the accident and they were blackened from exposure. A witness testified that at the time of the accident the wires were about eight to ten feet above the ground,4 a condition which another witness had observed in July of 1964, two months prior to the accident, and which existed when he had observed the wires from time to time over a period of many years. The power company should have known that children and adults were frequently in the vicinity of the wires as they went to fish and play nearby. There was evidence that the continued maintenance of the wires in their condition at the time of the accident violated the National Electrical Safety Code published by the Bureau of Standards. The decedent was six feet two inches tall and if the wires had sagged to eight feet above the ground, they would not be far above his outstretched arms.
The power company offered no explanation for its failure to de-energize the abandoned line which the evidence indicated could have been done in a matter of minutes with no difficulty. Thus the power company maintained an uninsulated abandoned line for over fourteen years and never took the simple precaution of de-energizing it, but maintained it in its lethal state in an area where it knew children and adults passed by, and did not even inspect the line for the period of over four years preceding the fatal accident.
It is dangerous enough to have uninsulated power lines of high voltage in country areas, but if they are maintained, surely periodic inspections should be frequent and if they are abandoned the simple precaution of de-energizing the wires, should not be neglected for years, during which, unused and unattended, they inevitably sag and reach close to the ground, and especially is this so when they are situated in an area where human beings may easily come in contact with them.
In these circumstances it seems to me that the conclusion could rationally be reached that a risk existed of which the company must be taken to have been aware and which it disregarded by intentional conduct of an unreasonable character out of a conscious indifference to its consequences. A conscious decision not to bother with the inspection of wires and to leave them live and uninsulated, although abandoned for a long time, is intentional conduct of an unreasonable character which under the circumstances the jury would have a right to find constituted wanton misconduct.
I therefore believe it was error for the court to refuse to submit the question of wanton misconduct to the jury and to charge that if it found there was wanton misconduct plaintiff would not be barred by any contributory negligence.
Plaintiff requested a charge to the jury to this effect and the incomplete record does not show that it was refused because the doctrine of willful misconduct had not been expressly pleaded. Unless more is shown to create a bar for failure to plead, we would normally apply the liberal right to amend which Rule 15 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure provides.
I therefore would reverse the judgment and remand for a new trial and respectfully dissent from the affirmance of the judgment for defendant.

. Crane v. Neal, 389 Pa. 329, 332-333, 132 A.2d 675, 677 (1957).

. Restatement (Second) of Torts, §§ 500, 501(1).

. Prosser, Law of Torts, § 34, pp. 187-89; § 64, pp. 436-37 (3d ed. 1964); see also 2 Harper & James, Law of Torts § 22.6 (1956).

. Of course, we must accept all evidence favorable to the plaintiff and reject all evidence harmful to his case since we are testing a judgment entered by the court after the jury had disagreed. See Lescenznski v. Pittsburgh Railways Co., 409 Pa. 102, 105, 185 A.2d 538, 539 (1962).