Court Opinion

ID: 9733307
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 17:02:27.39992+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:40.364591
License: Public Domain

Alcorn, J.
(dissenting). I cannot agree. The majority reaches its result by a particular interpretation of the evidence. The result would be correct if the interpretation was the only reasonable one. Our responsibility is to protect this plaintiff’s substantive right to have the evidence interpreted by a jury if the evidence is reasonably susceptible to more than one interpretation. We are not reviewing an exercise of discretion by the trial court. The sole question is whether evidence was offered from which a reasonable difference of opinion could exist as to the issue of liability. I believe that the case contains such evidence.
The jury were entitled to believe the bus driver’s statement, “As I started my turn from Olive Street *20into Grand Avenue, I never looked again to my right” and were not required to adopt the interpretation, which the majority puts on this and other portions of his testimony, to the effect that he did look. The jury were not required to interpret the obscure language of one witness, as the majority does, to mean that the decedent was running to overtake the bus from behind. The jury could reasonably have found that the decedent left the south curb of Grand Avenue within the marked crosswalk and with the traffic light in his favor and that he began to run, but had gone not more than fourteen feet when the contact with the bus occurred, inches in back of the glass-paneled door opposite the driver. From this evidence, the jury could reasonably have found either that the driver did not look at all or that he looked but failed to see the decedent. From either finding, the jury could have concluded that the driver was negligent, that as a result the bus, making a wide arc, struck the decedent a sideswiping blow, and that the rear wheels passed over the decedent’s body, which was still within the crosswalk. The majority concludes that the bus driver was not negligent. That is not the only reasonable conclusion on a permissible interpretation of the evidence. Whether he was negligent and, if he was, whether the decedent was contributorily negligent, remained questions for the jury.
In this opinion King, J., concurred.