Court Opinion

ID: 9830141
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 19:54:44.277192+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:13.804386
License: Public Domain

On Appellee’s Motion for a Rehearing,
Upon a reconsideration of this case on appellee’s motion for a rehearing, the majority of the court have become convinced that the case was correctly decided in the original opinion, and that appellee should be granted a rehearing and the judgment of the court below affirmed. It will therefore be so ordered. The writer, however, feels constrained to dissent from this conclusion. The evidence utterly fails to show that the freight train standing upon appellant’s main track and across the street appellee was traveling in any way- caused appellee’s horse to become frightened. Its only effect was to cause the detention of appellee until the train was run in on the side track, and the sole cause of the horse becoming frightened was the operation of this train on that track. As said in Stanton v. Railway Co., cited in the opinion on appellant’s motion for a rehearing, “the wrongful and negligent acts complained of must be the efficient cause of the damage sustained. Whether directly or indirectly the damage must be the natural consequences of the wrong.” The fright of appellee’s horse and the injury sustained by him was not in my opinion the natural *647consequence or a proximate result of permitting the freight train to block the crossing. This may have contributed remotely to such results and injury, but the only proximate cause which frightened the horse was, as said, the operation of the train on the side track. It is a well-established rule that an act, though negligent, which did not proximately cause or contribute to the injury complained of, furnishes no ground for an action. So also a condition of affairs, although negligent, cannot be considered as a proximate cause when there is an independent intervening agency which actually brings about the accident. The rule is expressed in 29 Cyc. p. 496, thus: “A prior and remote cause cannot be made the basis of an action if such remote cause did nothing more than furnish the condition or give rise to the occasion by which the injury was made possible, if there intervened between such prior or remote cause and the injury, a distinct, successive, unrelated, and efficient cause of the injury. If no danger existed in the condition except because of the independent cause, such condition was not the proximate cause [citing numerous decisions, among them, Missouri, etc., R. Co. v. Dobbins, 40 S. W. 861], And if an independent negligent act or defective condition sets into operation the circumstances, which because of the prior defective condition results in injury, such subsequent act or condition is the proximate cause.” In Railway Company v. Gerald, 128 S. W. 171, it is said: “If there intervenes between a remote cause and the injury a distinct, unrelated, and efficient cause, or if no injury would have occurred, notwithstanding the condition, but for such independent cause, such remote cause does nothing more than furnish the condition, and Cannot be held to be either the sole or concurrent proximate cause.”
The pleadings and evidence in the case of Selleek v. Railway, Company, cited in the opinion on appellant’s motion for rehearing, were very different on the second appeal, as disclosed by the report of that case in 93 Mich. 375, 53 N. W. 556, 18 L. R. A. 154, from the pleadings and evidence as shown on its first appeal. As shown on the second appeal, the effect of the blockade was to cut off the view of the immediate cause of the fright of Selleek’s horses, and the court said: “In the present case there was no intervening cause. The obstruction of the highway was a continuous breach of duty. It was a cause operating at the time of the injury. The smoke and steam were concurrent, rather than intervening, causes. They were contemporaneous. They enveloped and environ-ed the freight train, and produced a condition of the cars. It was for the jury to say whether the fright of the horses was caused by the appearance of the freight cars, surrounded 'as théy were. • Again, If the team was frightened by the noise and steam and smoke under the circumstances, it was for the jury to say under testimony clearly tending to show that the team was used to passing trains and their attendant incidents whether it was not the presence of the freight train across the highway, obscuring the origin of the steam and smoke and noise, that was the cause of the fright and injury.” No such condition or situation as is described in the' Selleek Case on the second appeal existed in the- case at bar. The appellee Pool testified: “I had been standing between the switch track and the main track some three minutes when I saw this engine on the switch track. The first thing that attracted my attention to it my horse throwed his head up and looked down south, down the track, and, when I looked in that direction, I saw the train. When I first saw it, it was moving pretty fast, but I could not estimate the speed of it. I, reckon it must have been 60 steps, 60 yards away when I first saw it. I never heard the bell being rung on that engine, nor did I hear the whistle blow. * * * Right after my horse throwed his head up, he run right back, and I saw he was going to back back into the thing, and I thought I would pull- her around, and run her across the track on the south side, and I was going off on the south side. She (meaning the horse) got scared at the train — the train that was on the switch track on the Cotton Belt Railroad. I was about 20 yards from the switch track when I stopped, something like that. I was about the same distance from the main line. The train -on the main line was standing still. It did not move at all at the time my horse got frightened. The horse had its back to the train that was moving, and was facing the train that was standing. It turned away from the.train that was standing^ and wheeled right around that way and run back down the track towards the train that was coming in, run across ahead of it.”
I think appellee’s motion for a rehearing should be overruled, and that the judgment of the court below should stand reversed and the cause remanded for a new trial, but in accordance with' the views entertained by the majority of this court said motion is granted, and the judgment of the court below affirmed.