Court Opinion

ID: 9549185
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:14:33.043979+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:19:57.177307
License: Public Domain

Hale, J.
(dissenting)—I dissent. When a bus driver goes to sleep at the wheel of his bus, either from fatigue or from the effects of a medicine or from a combination of both, he and his employers should be held liable to the passengers for all injuries proximately caused thereby.
Richard Wagner had driven this route for 19 years. Several days before the accident in visiting his physician, Dr. *470Jack Faghin, for a routine annual medical check up, he mentioned a bothersome nasal condition. This did not appear to be disabling or a serious condition and when the doctor told Wagner that it could be readily taken care of, the doctor became either too busy or forgot to make out a prescription. On Friday next, though, January 26th, Wagner returned to Dr. Faghin’s office and reminded him of it. The doctor was busy at the time but wrote out a prescription for pyribanzamine. The prescription, filled at the Group Health Cooperative Clinic Pharmacy, consisted of 25 pills, and the label read “Take 1 tablet 4 times daily before meals and bedtime.”
Wagner had no conversations with and received no instructions or warning from Dr. Faghin or from the label concerning possible side effects of the pills. Saturday, January 27th, following his usual full night’s sleep, he took the first pill at 5:30 a. m., had breakfast, and started out with his bus at 7 a. m.
Two or three miles before reaching the place of the accident, he noted that his eyes were getting heavy, and he felt sort of groggy and noticed that his lips and tongue were getting dry. He says that he ignored this drowsiness, or grogginess, because he had had a good night’s sleep. Some 300 feet before the accident, Wagner made a proper turn at the corner. From that point on, he must have fallen sound asleep because he next recollects his eyes flying open when the bus jumped the curb at about 30 miles per hour and hit a pole. He says that in his mind he did not connect his drowsiness with the pill he had taken at 5:30 that morning.
That his sleep or drowsiness was a shallow one may be understood from the facts, because about one-half hour after the accident Wagner drove an automobile into Seattle with little difficulty, being quite wide awake throughout the drive.
I agree with the majority that whether the doctor was negligent in not warning his patient of the possible drowsiness from the medicine, considering even the casual and hurried manner in which the patient procured the pre*471scription, and whether such negligence, if any, was an efficient contributing cause, were questions of fact for the jury to resolve. I have little doubt though that the bus driver was negligent as a matter of law with no problem in that area to be submitted to the jury.
He was negligent as a matter of law because he went to sleep at the wheel, and because the statutes and ordinances of Seattle make it unlawful for one to drive a motor vehicle —much less a common carrier bus—while under the influence of any drug to a degree that renders him incapable of safe driving.
RCW 46.56.010 reads, in part:
“It is unlawful for any person who is an habitual user of or under the influence of any narcotic drug or who is under the influence of any other drug to a degree which renders him incapable of safely driving a vehicle to drive a vehicle upon the public highways. The fact that any person charged with a violation of this section is or has been entitled to use such drug under the laws of this state shall not constitute a defense against any charge of violating this section.” (Italics mine.)
The foregoing section makes it unlawful for any person who is under the influence of any drug to a degree rendering him incapable of safe driving to operate a vehicle on the public streets and highways. That the driver may have been entitled to use such drug is no defense to a charge brought under the section. Thus, obtaining the drug lawfully by purchase, prescription, or in the course of regular medical treatment, would seem to be no defense even to a criminal charge brought under RCW 46.56.010. How, then, could the right or entitlement to the drug be allowed in defense to a claim of civil negligence? Does not this statute place the whole burden on the driver? Is he not, under this act, charged with knowing the effects of drugs and medicines upon his faculties before he undertakes to drive a car?
One may have his eyes heavy lidded and feel drowsy without being an incompetent driver at the moment. These are premonitory warnings, and as long as they remain in the warning stages, no harm will likely result because *472the individual may, by exercise oí his will and other faculties, overcome them. But they are warnings of which he must, in my opinion, take heed. The driver assumes full responsibility for his ability to continue driving, not only because it is right that he have this responsibility but also because there is nowhere else to place it at the time the symptoms of drowsiness occur. Here the driver had premonitory symptoms of sleepiness several minutes before he went to sleep at the wheel of his bus.
The majority opinion overlooks the use of mild drugs by millions of people daily and of powerful drugs by others, many of which drugs produce symptoms of drowsiness or sleepiness in degrees varying from effects so slight as to be virtually unnoticeable to deep comatose states. Daily, for mild respiratory allergies, millions of people take antihistamines which they can purchase lawfully over the counter. Others in great numbers are taking tranquilizers, insulin, and other medicines, the use or denial of which may induce sleepiness, drowsiness or even coma. In my view, the statute puts the burden squarely upon the user. If he drives an automobile after knowingly taking the drug, mens rea is supplied. The scienter implied in the law, essential to a violation, is not that the state must prove knowledge that the drug will render one incapable of safe driving but imposes a far less heavy burden, i.e., knowledge merely that one has taken the drug.
Of course, one is not culpable if the drug or medicine was given him without his knowledge; but Wagner requested and received the medicine, he knowingly administered it to himself, aware that it could have some effect upon his system. He cannot then be said to have innocently taken the pill when he knew that he took it.
Under the majority view, one could drive a motor vehicle in a state of gross intoxication and be held innocent under a defense that, while he knew alcohol to be intoxicating, he had no reason to believe that the amount consumed would produce intoxication in him. Yet the law is clear that the sole test is intoxication while driving; if that is established, the only defense would be lack of scienter that *473the beverage consumed was alcoholic in content. Culpability commences with the knowing consumption of alcohol before or during driving. Where a drug detrimentally affects one’s driving ability to a material degree, culpability begins then, I would say, with the knowing ingestion of the drug or medicine before or while driving.
But this is not exclusively the case of the drugged or medicated driver. It is also the case of the sleeping driver, because a driver may feel the ordinary symptoms of drowsiness or heavy liddedness that may be as readily induced from overeating, overconsumption of alcohol, listening to soporific music on the car radio, fatigue, lack of sleep— or from any number of causes affecting people in normal health. That any one of these causes may have intruded into or contributed to the bus driver’s lapse is evidenced by his coming suddenly awake and his eyes flying open as the bus leaped the curb, and his ability to drive an automobile into Seattle less than one-half hour later.
Kaufman and Kantrowitz weigh all of these possibilities in their thesis that absolute liability be imposed on sleeping drivers. In their article, “The Case of the Sleeping Motorist,” 25 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 362 (1950), they summarize as follows:
“The motorist should continue to be judged by the reasonable man test as to all of his acts in driving. He should not be liable unless he drives carelessly. But when he goes insane, faints or falls asleep while propelling his automobile along the highway, he ceases to be a driver. The risks of his ceasing to be a driver while his car goes rolling along should be borne by him and not by the hapless individual who gets hit. The driverless, but moving automobile is a mechanized wild beast. Responsibility for the harms caused by the involuntary abandonment of an automobile ferae naturae should be in the one from whose leash the beast has escaped.
“You must, at your peril, stay sane and conscious as you sit behind the wheel with the ignition on, the brakes off and your foot on the gas pedal.”
In Bernosky v. Greff, 350 Pa. 59, 38 A. (2d) 35, the driver fell asleep while driving on a three-lane highway and lost control of his car. Leaving the highway, the vehicle struck *474a telegraph pole 14 feet from the edge of the highway causing injuries to a passenger. The court, reversing a judgment for the defendant driver, said:
“Any individual who ‘falls asleep’ naturally, does so either willingly or through exhaustion. If he falls asleep willingly while driving an automobile he is, of course, negligent. If he drives an automobile while he is in such a state of exhaustion that he falls asleep though he does not will to do so, he is equally negligent, for he is chargeable with knowledge that an individual in a state of exhaustion is likely to fall asleep.”
In Pacific Employers Ins. Co. v. Morris, 78 Ariz. 24, 275 P. (2d) 389, we see a good reason for the rule that falling asleep at the wheel of a moving vehicle is negligence per se. There evidence was submitted that the driver had died a second or so before his car swerved across the highway into the path of an oncoming truck. Allowing only sudden death as a defense, that court seems to adopt a rule of strict liability toward the sleeping driver when it says:
“We believe the question resolves itself into one of two alternatives, to wit, that Judge Baughn was either negligent or he was dead at the time the accident occurred. If he was dead at the time he could not be guilty of negligence ...”
having earlier said:
“. . . Or if he went to sleep while driving and thus permitted the car to cross to the wrong side of the road he was guilty of negligence and in such event plaintiff [truck owner] should prevail.”
Directly in point, Theisen v. Milwaukee Auto. Mut. Ins. Co., 18 Wis. (2d) 91, 118 N. W. (2d) 140, expresses a modern and perhaps an inevitable point of view necessary to administering justice on the traffic-gorged streets and high-speed highways of today. In that case, the driver of the car, returning from a party at 3:00 a.m., went to sleep at the wheel of his car. It gradually edged off the road and hit a tree stump, killing the driver. In an action by one of the passengers, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin held it negligence per se to fall asleep while driving, saying:
*475“The trial court excluded an offer of proof made by the defendant which would have shown Shepherd was not a habitual user of alcoholic beverages and was physically exhausted from the loss of considerable sleep for some six weeks prior to the accident practicing for the play, getting to bed later than his normal bedtime, and continuing his usual farm chores. It was not error of the trial court to reject this evidence offered to prove a justification for going to sleep. On the contrary, such proof would have tended to show Shepherd should have known, as a reasonably prudent man, he was likely to have fallen asleep. Such offer of proof, of course, is immaterial under our holding that falling asleep while driving is negligence as a matter of law.”
The court called for a rule of strict liability, saying:
“We must approach a sleeping-driver case on the premise the driver has the duty to stay awake while he drives and it is within his control either to stay awake, to cease driving, or not to drive at all when sleepy. . . .
“. . . Although it has been argued the liability of a sleeping driver should be absolute on the grounds of an extrahazardous activity, we do not base our decision on that ground but hold that falling asleep at the wheel is negligence as a matter of law because no facts can exist which will justify, excuse, or exculpate such negligence.
Theisen v. Milwaukee Auto. Mut. Ins. Co., supra, reaffirmed in Voight v. Voight, 22 Wis. (2d) 573, 126 N. W. (2d) 543.
We have now in the second half of this century reached a point in the control of traffic where rules having their roots in pastoral England—with coach, carriage and farm wagon moving deliberately along what would now be no more than a country lane—have little relevancy to the case of the sleeping or drugged driver. In those areas of a city or town where traffic perforce moves comparatively slowly —as in a business district—the hazards and consequences generated by the sleeping driver to pedestrian, passenger and nearby traffic alike are great indeed, yet the problems of proof may not be insoluble. But on the great freeways and expressways going through, around and connecting our large centers of population where automobiles roll along at *47670 to 80 miles per hour, lane by lane, car after car, leaving and entering the freeway in endless streams, the consequences of the sleeping or drugged driver are frightful to contemplate, and they have little or no relevance whatever to concepts of negligence and burden of proof.
Every person operating a motor vehicle on the public streets, roads and highways stands charged with the knowledge that he will be moving his vehicle in areas where pedestrian and vehicular traffic may be heavy and where vehicles may move swiftly or on the major highways at great speeds. He stands charged with the knowledge that he will encounter these hazards and that a collision between automobiles traveling at high speeds may set off a reaction of successive collisions. He should also be deemed to know that the law will hold him accountable for falling asleep at the wheel of his car.
I would, therefore, impose upon the driver of a vehicle a rule of strict liability if he falls asleep while driving. I think that every person driving an automobile upon the public highways warrants to all other persons upon or near the highway that he will stay awake while at the wheel of his automobile. The law ought exact from every driver this minimum duty and entertain no defenses for its breach.
The rule of strict liability does not, in my opinion, deprive the driver and his company of their action over against the doctor and Group Health. It still remains a question of fact as to whether the physician, in the exercise of reasonable medical care, owed a duty in these circumstances to advise the patient that the medicine would induce a sleep or a coma, and whether the breach of such duty, if any, was an efficient contributing cause of the accident.
April 19, 1965. Petition for rehearing denied.