Court Opinion

ID: 9736507
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:58:31.046313+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:27:07.088297
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Musmanno:
Without intending any disrespect I cannot help feeling that the description of the mechanical devices involved in this case, as given in the Majority Opinion, sounds like the description of a complicated invention in a Rube Goldberg cartoon, to wit: “The Bommer type hinge is equipped with two spring barrels one of which is on either side of the door. The barrel springs are adjusted to equalize their tension so that the door stays on the transverse center line of the doorway when in its normal closed position. When the door is pushed open the motion winds' the one spring, thereby increasing its. tension; and, concomitantly, the opposite spring is unwound which reduces its tension. As the door is released from an open position, the tension of the tightened spring causes the door to swing back which it ordinarily does to a point beyond the line of its normal closed position, thus creating a tension in the opposite spring which, in turn, causes the door to swing back the other way. During the diminishing progress of the oscillation, the tension in the two springs becomes equalized and the door comes to rest at its closed position where it remains until pushed open again.”
As the Majority Opinion progresses, its logic oscillates from the transverse center line of precedent until the tension of the facts is overcome by the concomitant force of spring barrel technicality and finally the decision comes to rest in a closed position with the plaintiff outside the doors of the courthouse and the right to a jury trial lying prostrate beside her.
On January 31, 1950, the plaintiff Jane McAdoo walked into the Autenreith’s Dollar Store at 3605 *398Forbes Street in Pittsburgh for the purpose of purchasing commodities on sale in that establishment. The store’s entrance is made up of double swinging doors hung from hinges fastened to either side of the portal frame. Folding back the right door and crossing the threshold, Mrs. MeAdoo moved to the left toward a counter displaying wares of interest to her. Another customer on his way out of the store proceeded through the other half of the swinging doors (the one to her left). Yielding to push, his door went to the limit of its outward arc and then swung back, passed dead center and continued on into the store striking the plaintiff who was now in its direct path. The force of the backswing was such that, hitting the plaintiff on the right leg, it catapulted her forward seven feet against a counter, ripping off a fingernail, throwing her to the floor and inflicting other injuries not necessary to describe here.
The jury, after hearing the case, returned a verdict for the plaintiff in the amount of $4,766.00. The defendant store appealed and this Court is entering judgment notwithstanding the verdict. I do not believe that in law and justice the nullification of this jury verdict may be justified. As recently as January, 1953, this Court said in the case of Jerominski v. Fowler, 372 Pa. 291, 295: “A store owner who invites the public to do business on his premises, although not an insurer of the safety of the invitee, has the affirmative duty of maintaining his premises in a reasonably safe condition for the contemplated use thereof and for the purpose for which the invitation was extended, or to give warning of any failure to maintain them in that condition.”
Were the doors in the defendant’s store maintained in a reasonably safe condition? That was a question for the jury to decide. In the same Jerominski case *399we said: “It was for the jury to determine whether the care required under the circumstances was met by the defendant.”
The Majority Opinion bases much of its decision on the proposition that the plaintiff did not offer testimony to show that the defendant store’s doors with their devices “were inadequate, out of adjustment, improper or defective.” There was no such burden on the plaintiff. A person who goes into a store to help enrich the store’s owner has the right to expect that after entering the establishment, the door will not violently return to strike him down like an avenging fury. Once the plaintiff in this case showed that she was free from contributory negligence and that she was injured in a manner which argued that if the store owner had exercised due care the accident would not ordinarily have occurred, there fell upon the defendant proprietor a duty to show that he did meet his responsibility of due care under the circumstances. Whether he successfully carried that burden was for the jury to decide — not the Court.
In House v. Schreiber, 168 Pa. Superior Ct. 621, the plaintiffs suffered property damage when water seeped through the ceiling of their business place. The floor above was occupied by a manufacturing concern. The plaintiffs did not affirmatively show that the defendant was guilty of negligence, but the verdict returned for the plaintiffs was affirmed by the Superior Court, which said that the “inference of negligence clearly arises from the circumstances Which were established, and plaintiffs were not required to show defendant’s negligence by direct evidence.” The defendant contended in that case that the plaintiffs’ damages could have resulted from other water pipes in the building, biit the Superior Court emphasized: “The law does not require the elimination of every possible cause other *400than the cause on which plaintiffs rely, but only such, if any, as fairly arise from the evidence, [citing cases] It is not necessary for a plaintiff to exclude everything which the ingenuity of counsel may suggest.”
The Majority Opinion here says: “This failure of proof on the part of the plaintiff is the more significant in the light of the testimony of the expert called by the defendant who stated without contradiction that the Bommer type of hinge is the standard hinge used in some super markets, five and ten cent stores and moving picture theatres where lightweight doors are installed on wooden jambs such as in the entrance to the defendant’s store.” The Majority then goes on to say that the Bommer type of hinge is used “in and about Pittsburgh in ninety percent of the stores like the defendant’s.” How about the other ten percent? It is within the realm of possibility that the other ten percent refuse to use the Bommer hinge because it is capable of doing what it did in this case.
The hinge expert for the defendant testified that the performance of the Bommer hinge is affected by season and weather. In one part of his testimony this expert said that a door hung on this type of hinge “wouldn’t go past more than 30 degrees of its 90 degree travel.” Later he said that without a broken spring it would be impossible for the door “to go in more than 45 degrees. It would have to be an awfully cold day.”* Does this mean that a patron before entering a store must consult the Zodiac and a thermometer to ascertain whether a door will continue beyond the limit of its normal backward arc to pursue the patron and strike him down? Furthermore, there is no proof that the spring was not broken, a possibility which- the expert, acknowledged could convert the door from an innocuous portal into a battering ram. The *401expert testified that he first saw the hinge on April 17, 1951. The accident happened on January 31, 1950. In the sixteen months which passed between the date of the accident and the date of inspection the hinge could have been repaired many times.
The Majority says that “The question for decision, therefore, is whether the entrance doors provided by the defendant were reasonably safe for their intended purpose when used with ordinary care,” and then adds: “The question is not, as the plaintiff assumes, whether the proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injury was the defendant’s failure to equip the doors with checks or retarding devices that would stop the backward swing of the door instanter on the line of its normal position when closed.” But how is the plaintiff to show whether the doors were reasonably safe? Reasonable safety is an abstract proposition that cannot be decided in a vacuum. There must be some objective application of the doctrine and one of the objectivities submitted by the plaintiff is that the doors were not reasonably safe because they were not equipped with checks or retarding devices which would stop the backward swing at dead center. It must be admitted that if the doors came to a rest parallel with the threshold the accident could not have happened. The defendant’s expert admitted that the offending door did travel beyond the sill on the return swing and did penetrate into the building. Was it negligence on the part of the defendant store to allow the door to swing in that manner? That was the question for the jury to decide, and that is the question this Court has taken from the jury, thus depriving the plaintiff of the right to have a factual question passéd upon by the tribunal guaranteed to her by the law of the land.
The Majority Opinion says: “In the instant case there is not a scintilla of evidence that the defendant’s *402swinging doors deviated in any way from ordinary and customary usage. . . .” But that is not the test of reasonable care. The question is not whether the defendant’s doors were like other doors, but whether they were safe on January 31, 1950. Other stores could have had similar defective doors equipped with defective hinges but by the grace of God have not injured other customers — but that fact would not make the defendant’s doors safe. And then how is it to be known that the doors in other stores have not also knocked down customers? There is no evidence in the case from which the Majority can draw any such conclusion even if it could surmount the barrier of res inter alios aeta.
The Majority Opinion says that “the deficient evidentiary situation in the instant case is strikingly similar to that disclosed in Miller v. Republic Chemical Company, 251 Pa. 593.” To compare the facts in the Miller case with the facts in the instant case is like comparing the doors of a blast furnace with the doors of a doll house. They both come within the genus of doors but they are as dissimilar as A and Z. The Miller case had to do with a massive mill crane, heavy machinery and gondola railroad cars. The present case has to do with the doors to a 25-eent-and-dollar-store. While it is true that principles are immutable regardless of circumstances, it is still true that the reasonable care required in using a crowbar to move a railroad tie is somewhat different from that required to dislodge a wedged chestnut.
The law books have recorded (in various parts of the United States) cases in which plaintiffs recovered verdicts because the checks and retarding devices on swinging doors ■ were defective.' The plaintiff thus properly contends that if recovery is permitted because a safety device is defective, certainly recovery should be allowed where the safety device.is completely miss*403ing. The Majority rejects this argument as fallacious saying that “not all swinging doors, which are not equipped with checking or retarding devices, are dangerous if used with reasonable care.” But the plaintiff here says that the culpable door was so hung and so hinged that it did not function as a safe door.
I will not attempt to analyze all the out-of-State cases cited and quoted from by the Majority. They may be persuasive to the Majority but they are not controlling in Pennsylvania. Nor am I at all convinced that the reasoning employed in those cases is always logical or that it even represents fairness and justice under law. For instance, in the New York case of White v. Board of Education of City of New York, 249 App. Div. 520, a five-year old child was injured when a swinging door (without checking or retarding devices) closed on her finger. The Court there admitted that “the accident probably could not have happened had there been a stop.” In spite of that startling admission so casually stated, the Court then went on to say: “'For untold generations, school children have been passing without accident through doors not equipped with stops.” How did the Court know that for untold generations school children had been passing without accident through unchecked doors? Where an appellate court decides, rightly or wrongly, that no recovery will be permitted in a given set of circumstances, most lawyers stop bringing actions based on a situation of that character even though they may not agree that the standard adopted by the appellate court is correct. Thus, it does not follow that simply because a certain type of accident does not appear in litigation before appellate courts that that kind of mishap is not actually happening. For instance, only recently we decided that Avhere a person is injured by a flying missile from a railroad train he does not *404need to show negligence on the part of the railroad. Yet for forty years the law (because of Bradley v. L. S. & M. S. Rwy. Co., 238 Pa. 315), held that such an untoward event did not require the railroad company to exculpate itself from presumed negligence. We finally repudiated the Bradley case. In a Concurring Opinion I said that the Bradley case “for many decades lay across the track of remedial justice like a steel and concrete barrier. No one can estimate the number of lawsuits that were either dismissed or never even begun because of the apparently insurmountable obstacle built up by that decision.”* Has the time not come to disavow a doctrine that sees no legal wrong in a situation which permits the crushing and mangling of fingers of five-year-old school tots?
The Majority finally dismisses the plaintiff’s case with the assertion that “To permit a finding of negligence in such circumstances would be tantamount to requiring mechanical stops or retarders on all swinging doors used by the public.” This assertion suggests that the decision is based not on the facts of this case but upon a fear as to what the result of this decision may be in other cases. It is our duty to decide one case at a time. We have no responsibility as to what should be done on “all swinging doors used by the public.” If somebody is injured by a swinging door without a stopping or retarding device we will consider that case when it comes before us, but I object to founding a present decision on facts, condition, circumstances and events hypothetically scheduled to occur in a future which may or may not ever arrive.

 Italics throughout, mine.

 Mack v. Reading Co., 377 Pa. 135, 142.