Court Opinion

ID: 9449614
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:17:11.256583+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:54.699670
License: Public Domain

McLAUGHLIN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting) .
The majority opinion offers a compendium of decisions dealing with some of the general principles of res ipsa loquitur with which there is no basic disagreement. It suggests no decisions with controlling facts comparable to the unique situation admittedly permeating the whole litigation before us. It calls for vacation of the judgment entered after the second trial as to which it states that the only issue there concerned was that of damages. Actually, that trial properly resulted in a general verdict in favor of the defendant. The opinion’s next stop is to reverse the order following the first trial which granted the defendant’s motion for a new trial. It then directs that the verdict and the judgment for the plaintiff be reinstated. In so doing, the opinion nimbly passes over the glaring fact that the doctrine or res ipsa loquitur upon which the reversal is entirely based was never presented, expressly or impliedly, in the pleadings, pretrial, trial, post trial or on appeal; was indeed disclaimed by plaintiff-appellee at the re-arguments of this appeal.
There was no contention ever in this suit that plaintiff could not have asserted a res ipsa loquitur theory in connection with his action but we are dealing with a condition not a theory. And the unescapable condition here is that res ipsa loquitur was not, and down to this moment is not, any part of plaintiff’s evidential proof or any part of this cause from its inception to the current opinion of this court. The majority grudgingly concedes that it was never before the jury but nevertheless announces the amazing interpretation of the verdict as based upon res ipsa loquitur “sans such an instruction”. The majority refuses to face up to the record which plainly reveals the uncontradicted true trial situation detailed by the plaintiff to the court, jury and defense. The nub of it was that plaintiff undertook to show actual or constructive notice of the broken dog in the defendant and asserted that he had done so by evidence that the dog was broken at the time of the accident. That was not invocation of res ipsa loquitur, namely, that control of the dog by the defendant warranted an inference of negligence. And there was no misapprehension of the trial issue by the parties or the judge. No one concerned, including the plaintiff, had the slightest thought that the whole schema of the plaintiff would be eliminated from the case and that there would be substituted in its stead a new ground, formulated by this court following the third appellate argument. In reliance upon that new ground two verdicts and judgments in favor of the defendant are to be set aside and plaintiff’s judgment, into which res ipsa loquitur never entered, is to be reinstated.
The hard effort to obtain the above named result refuses to be concerned with the palpable injustice of the decision. It refuses to follow a fundamental concept of the doctrine it calls upon. If there had ever been an inkling that res ipsa loquitur would be urged, the defense would have been specifically entitled as of right to affirmatively offer evidence to overcome inferences that the dog broke because it was defective, or lack of due care by the railroad, etc. That line of proof would stem directly from an issue of res ipsa loquitur being raised. In those circumstances, the question of whether the defense proof had overcome the res ipsa inference would be properly for the jury. But none of those elements was involved in the first trial or the second either for that matter. The defendant had no opportunity or cause to refute a non-existent charge which had not been made or even hinted at and of which the court and jury had no knowledge. It cannot be overemphasized that the referred to non-existent charge is the proposition at this time injected into the litigation by the majority opinion viz. that negligence in the defendant could be inferred from its control of the broken *866dog, to which must be joined its unmentioned but indispensable corollary, that the inference could be overcome if defendant’s explanation, if in evidence, was accepted as satisfactory.
It follows that the defendant has been deprived of its right to appear and defend itself in the after suit conceived by this court. A judgment is being entered on a view of the cause which never existed until the majority opinion. The sole excuse offered on behalf of that decision is that it all comes down to this — the field of our action is limited to either reinstatement of the judgment entered upon the jury’s verdict at the first trial or the affirmance of the judgment in favor of the defendant entered pursuant to the jury’s verdict at the second trial. The majority is of course proceeding in the utmost good faith but, even assuming the dilemma posed to be accurate, that alone is too precarious a foundation for, what seems to me, the grievous wrong being inflicted upon the appellee.
GANEY, Circuit Judge, joins in this dissent.