Court Opinion

ID: 9777001
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 19:51:08.646155+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:32:46.080896
License: Public Domain

HECHT, Justice,
joined by OWEN, Justice, concurring.
I join in the Court’s opinion and write briefly only to respond to Justice Enooh’s concurring opinion. The argument there, as I understand it, is that a trial court’s refusal to instruct the jury on the duty of care in a sudden emergency may be an abuse of discretion, but it can never be harmful, and therefore the instruction should never be given. The general proposition of this argument — that discretion should always be abused as long as no harm is done — is a peculiar notion, to say the least, to which the concurring opinion resorts because the only other way to discard the sudden emergency instruction is to disavow, straightforwardly, over six decades of Texas jurisprudence dating back to Hooks v. Orton, 30 S.W.2d 681 (Tex.Civ.App.-Beaumont 1930, no writ). See E. Wayne Thode, Imminent Peril and Emergency in Texas, 40 Tex.L.Rev. 441, 452 (1962). This would require overruling Yarborough v. Berner, 467 S.W.2d 188, 191-193 (Tex.1971), in which this Court held that when the pleadings and evidence raise an issue of sudden emergency, a party is entitled to a jury instruction on the subject. It would also require overruling Davila v. Sanders, 557 S.W.2d 770, 771 (Tex.1977) (per *361curiam), in which we refused to discard the sudden emergency instruction although we abolished the doctrine of imminent peril. It would also require disapproving dozens of appeals court cases before and after Yarbor-ough, and the Pattern Jury Charge instruction on sudden emergency. 1 State Bae of Texas, Texas Pattern JURY Charges, PJC 3.03 (1989).1 Finally, it would call into question other pattern instructions on similar “inferential rebuttal” issues, including “new and independent cause”, “sole proximate cause”, “unavoidable accident”, and “act of God”. Id. PJC 3.01-.02, 3.04-.05.
The rationale put forward in the concurring opinion for what would be a significant about-face in the law is that the substance of instructions like these is covered by other definitions and instructions in the charge, so that “inferential rebuttal” instructions are duplicative and unnecessary. This view assumes that it is a good thing for trial courts to tell juries as little as possible about the parties’ legal claims, a very dubious assumption at best. It may be that jurors unfamiliar with the law can, without too much difficulty, understand from the definition of negligence that ordinary care means one thing in sudden emergencies and another thing in less exigent circumstances. It may be that jurors can recognize that some accidents are unavoidable or the result of natural forces and not anyone’s fault. It may be that jurors can sort through the causative agents in an occurrence without any more guidance than the standard proximate cause definition provides. Even so, there is very little harm, and some advantage, in a trial court’s helping the jury with concepts like these. The law has long recognized this. The instructions the concurring opinion would abandon serve this purpose. I agree with Justice Peeples: “Our law has work enough to do without attempting to change settled instructions, especially when they are not causing problems but instead are serving the worthwhile goal of clarifying the parties’ contentions for the jury.” Perez v. Weingarten Realty Investors, 881 S.W.2d 490, 498 (Tex.App.-San Antonio 1994, writ requested) (Peeples, J., concurring).
The trial court must be afforded some discretion in deciding what instructions to give the jury. See Magro v. Ragsdale Bros., Inc., 721 S.W.2d 832, 836 (Tex.1986). Given the disputed evidence in this case, I agree with the Court that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to instruct the jury on sudden emergency.

. "When a person is confronted by an ‘emergency’ arising suddenly and unexpectedly, which was not proximately caused by any negligence on his part and which, to a reasonable person, requires immediate action without time for deliberation, his conduct in such an emergency is not negligence or failure to use ordinary care if, after such emergency arises, he acts as a person of ordinary prudence would have acted under the same or similar circumstances.”