Court Opinion

ID: 9447882
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:46:41.199318+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:13.414200
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Both the trial court and the original opinion of this court assumed that this case was governed by the question whether libelant’s or respondent’s account of the position of the ladder was correct. Libelant testified that she ascended to her upper berth by means of a movable ladder given her by the steward, and that the steward then removed the ladder and placed it next to the door adjacent to her berth. After she was in the berth a period of time, libelant reached out in order to secure the ladder to descend, and fell out of the berth, causing severe injury to herself. A quite different version of the accident was given by respondent, whose witnesses testified that libelant’s berth had a permanently affixed ladder. The district court accepted this latter testimony, and concluded that respondent wás not negligent and that the sole cause of the accident was libel-ant’s contributory negligence. On appeal, the only asserted error was the trial court’s failure to accept libelant’s version of the accident. Since there was substantial, indeed persuasive, evidence that the ladder was permanently affixed as described by respondent’s witnesses, we affirmed the judgment below.
At this point, plaintiff engaged new counsel and petitioned for rehearing. Our attention was then drawn for the first time to the possibility that, even accepting respondent’s account as to the permanent placement of the ladder, respondent was negligent because such placement made access to the ladder unreasonably difficult and awkward. Photographs of libelant’s cabin show that the ladder is affixed to the side of the upper berth at the head end of the bunk. Be*565tween the ladder and the sleeping surface of the bunk is a sideboard extending more than a foot to the left and right of the ladder and rising above the surface of the bunk. It would seem that the necessity of climbing over this board makes it difficult for a person to get on to the ladder from the upper bunk. Indeed, one of libelant’s fellow passengers testified that she and the libelant both had trouble with the bunk because it was a “little complicated.”
Thus I think new factual and legal issues have been raised as to whether respondent was negligent in the manner of placement of the ladder and as to whether this negligence proximately caused libelant’s injuries. It is clear from the opinion below that the trial court never considered these issues, but rather assumed that the respondent would be absolved if its version as to the placement of the ladder were accepted. In my view, this was error. Accordingly I would reverse and remand for findings in the light of whatever additional evidence is ■thought necessary bearing on the questions whether respondent was negligent in its placement of the ladder and whether this negligence proximately caused libelant’s injuries.
I do not think libelant should be denied relief simply because the above basis for finding respondent negligent was not rec■ognized until rehearing. The evidentiary basis for recovery was established at trial, through the respondent’s own witnesses, and its disregard would seem to be plain error. That libelant, a highly nervous woman grievously injured, gave a contrasting account of the accident after periods of understandable stress 1 should not be given controlling importance to the exclusion of this evidence bearing so directly on the primary issue of negligence. That her original lawyer, faced with these difficulties of ascertaining the facts, and with an additional barrier of language (she had to testify through an interpreter), did not quickly grasp the way the trial was shaping up and immediately change his theory seems understandable.2 True, the district judge found her testimony untrustworthy for reasons not closely in point here, since they bore upon her later medical treatment;3 but I see no reason to penalize her in her claim for damages, since the respondent developed the testimony and obviously cannot be considered as prejudiced by what it itself brought into the case. And the idea that for some procedural reason she should not now be allowed to change her legal theory to conform to the evidence, on an issue well within the terms of her original libel, seems unworthy of a modern court obligated to do justice, rather than merely to vindicate legal procedure.
I therefore dissent from the denial of libelant’s petition for rehearing.

. Immediately upon her fall she was taken to the ship’s hospital, remaining there under sedatives — “shouting” and “crying,” as she testified — for six days until the ship reached Naples, where she was hospitalized for 3% months, before coming to this country, where she was again hospitalized. Under the circumstances remembrance of the details of her accident — so quickly occurring — might well be fuzzy.

. Difficulties of rapport between client and counsel persisted through the argument of this appeal, as is shown by the star (*) footnote of the opinion.

. For understandable reasons he did not believe her testimony that the doctor and attendants “pulled her like an animal on the floor.” But this exaggerated statement obviously stems from her not unnatural anger at the considerable delay in treatment while the vessel proceeded from Haifa to Naples.