Court Opinion

ID: 9778980
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 21:30:57.354099+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:23:41.144600
License: Public Domain

ANDERSON, Justice.
The parties will be referred to as in the trial court, the appellant, Elvin Wilson, as plaintiff, and the appellee, Texas Cresoting Company, as defendant. There were other parties to the suit, but it is not necessary that further notice be taken of them.
The plaintiff sued to recover damages for personal injuries which he sustained while unloading poles from a railroad flat-car. He alleged that the poles had been loaded in a negligent manner, and that this was the proximate cause of his injuries. The defendant was alleged to have been the loader and shipper of the poles. Trial to a jury resulted in a verdict in favor of the defendant, and in a judgment that the plaintiff take nothing by his suit.
The poles were consigned to Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation. They were to be used as piles, and were to be unloaded by the plaintiff’s employer, Ole Peterson & Sons, Inc., a subcontractor under the consignee. The defendant was not alleged to have participated in or to have been responsible for unloading them.
There were approximately 32 poles in the particular load. Some of them were more than 70 feet long, and two flat cars were used for their transportation. The plaintiff’s evidence, was to the effect that the weight of the load was supported by one *231car, and that the small ends of the poles were merely overhanging the other car. Before unloading operations were commenced, the poles were secured in place on the car by standards or small saplings which had been inserted in cuffs along the sides of the car, and by metal bands which encircled all of the poles. Wires had also been passed across the top of the load and around the standards so as to tie the standards on one side of the car to their opposite numbers on the other side of the car.
According to the plaintiff’s version of the manner in which the poles were secured in place, there were only twelve standards on the car (six on each side — three at each end of the car), and all of the metal bands, of which there were some six or eight, extended around all of the poles together; no bands or wires extended through the load so as to secure the poles in place by separate tiers.
Preparatory to unloading the poles with a hoisting machine, the plaintiff climbed on top of the load, and with an axe cut all of the metal bands and wire9 by which the poles were secured in place. This left only the standards on the sides of the car to prevent lateral motion of the poles. He then walked out onto the end of a pole that jutted out some three or four feet beyond the ends of the other poles, placed a sling around the ends of three of the top poles, and, while still standing or squatting on the end of the pole he had walked out on, sig-nalled for the operator of the hoisting machine to raise the ends of the three poles. These three poles were either brought into contact with the standards on one side of the car, or else their being lifted caused the remaining poles to shift their positions and exert greater pressure on the standards, just which is not made entirely clear by the evidence. In either event, the standards on one side of the car gave away, and the poles rolled to the ground, carrying the plaintiff with them. He was seriously injured by the fall and by being struck by the falling poles.
The plaintiff alleged that in loading the poles the defendant had been negligent (1) in placing too heavy a load on the car, (2) in failing to brace the load with a sufficient number of stakes along the sides of the car, (3) in using stakes along the sides of the car that were not strong enough to brace the load properly, (4) in only placing bands around the entire load of poles, and in not placing bands through the load between the several tiers of poles, (S) in failing to place wire across the car from stake to stake, between the tiers of poles, (6) and in failing to brace the stakes on the sides of the car by adequately wiring those on one side of the car to those on the opposite side.
In addition to a general denial, the defendant plead contributory negligence on the part of plaintiff as a proximate cause of the latter’s injuries, and also that in the circumstances outlined by the defendant as having attended plaintiff’s injuries, the plaintiff was precluded from recovering judgment by the rule of law which is expressed in the maxim, “volenti non fit in-juria.”
The jury found no negligence on the part of the defendant, and found that the plaintiff was guilty of negligence in each of the following respects: (1) in cutting all of the bands from around the poles without adding additional supports or braces to hold the poles in place; (2) in remaining on the poles after cutting all bands from around them; (3) in signalling for a part of the poles to be raised while he was still standing on one or more of them; (4) in remaining on the poles after all bands had been cut from around them, when he knew or in the exercise of ordinary care should have known that the supporting stakes were not strong enough to hold the poles in place while they were being unloaded; (5) in failing to get off the poles while a part of them were being lifted. Each act of negligence so found was found to be a proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries; and such injuries were found not to have been the result of an unavoidable accident.
Eleven points of alleged error are contained in appellant’s brief; but as we understand the brief and the record, points eight through eleven are recognized by appellant *232as being without proper support in the record, and are not insisted upon by him. The other seven points complain of rulings of the trial court by which certain evidence which the plaintiff sought to introduce was excluded, and of rulings which prevented plaintiff’s counsel from cross-examining certain witnesses about certain matters.
Appellant’s first five points complain of the exclusion of evidence which pertained to the same general subject matter. Points one, two, three, and five complain of the exclusion of certain testimony with reference to the manner in which other cars of similar poles, and one car in particular, had been loaded, and of the trial court’s refusal to permit the witnesses to compare and contrast the manner in which those cars had been loaded and the manner in which the car from which plaintiff fell had been loaded. Point four complains of the trial court’s refusal to admit into evidence the testimony of H. J. Boswell relative to the effect, from the standpoint of the safety of persons undertaking to unload the poles, which would have been produced by separating the tiers of poles by wires or bands, and by placing more and stronger stakes along the sides of the car.
Appellant’s sixth and seventh points are as follows:
Sixth Point
“The error of the trial court in refusing appellant the privilege of questioning appel-lee’s leading witness, Carl Hillman, further about the changes in the rules, after he had testified on direct examination that the rules 'are not effective today. They have been changed.’ ”
Seventh Point
“The error of the trial court in refusing to permit appellant to cross-question appel-lee’s witness, Bruce Reese Brantner, relative to the witness’s interpretation and use of rules that had been previously introduced in evidence by appellee.”
The rules referred to in the foregoing points six and seven were the loading rules of the American Association of Railroads. Those rules, as they existed at’ the time plaintiff received his injuries, were introduced into evidence by the defendant, and evidence was then introduced to show that the subject car had been loaded in conformity with them. The jury found that the car was loaded in conformity with the rules, and that such manner of loading was not negligence.
Under numerous counter-points, the ap-pellee has undertaken to show that under the established rules of evidence the excluded testimony was properly excluded; that if error was committed, it was harmless because substantially the same testimony was introduced from other sources and even by the same witnesses during the course of the trial; and that if error was committed, it was harmless because the trial court erred in not granting the defendant’s motion for an instructed verdict.
Defendant’s motion for an instructed verdict was predicated upon the theory that as a matter of law the evidence established that the plaintiff himself had been guilty of negligence which proximately caused his injuries, and upon the theory that as a matter of law the evidence made applicable the rule of law which is expressed in the maxim, “volenti non fit injuria.”
We find it unnecessary to pass upon or to discuss these contentions of the appel-lee, or even to pass upon whether or not error was committed by the trial court in any of the respects charged by the appellant. Assuming, without deciding, that the trial court erred in each of the respects charged, such errors do not require a reversal of the trial court’s judgment.
It is not necessary that we detail the testimony which appellant claims was erroneously excluded, or that we set out what he might have hoped to accomplish by further cross-examination of the witnesses mentioned in his sixth and seventh points. What we have already said makes it sufficiently clear that the excluded evidence could have been relevant only to the issues pertaining to the defendant’s negligence, and could have had no bearing on the issues with reference to whether in doing or *233failing to do certain things in the circumstances that actually existed, the plaintiff was himself guilty of negligence which proximately caused his injuries. If the defendant had been found negligent in all of the respects charged, and such negligence had been found to have been a proximate cause of plaintiff’s injuries, the judgment in favor of the defendant would still have been required by the findings that the plaintiff was himself guilty of negligence which proximately caused his injuries. This being true, and since the excluded evidence was wholly irrelevant to the issues on which the judgment was based, its exclusion becomes immaterial and does not present reversible error. Gross v. Dallas Ry. & Terminal Co., Tex.Civ.App., 131 S.W.2d 113, Dism. Judgm.Cor.; Benson v. Weaver, Tex.Civ. App., 250 S.W.2d 770, affirmed, Tex.Sup., 254 S.W.2d 95; Connor v. Heard & Heard, Inc., Tex.Civ.App., 242 S.W.2d 205, writ ref. n.r.e.
No reversible error being presented, the judgment of the trial court is affirmed.