Brown v. Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Company

• Decision Date: 06 July 1906
• Citation: 41 So. 383,88 Miss. 687
• Parties: DANIEL W. BROWN v. YAZOO & MISSISSIPPI VALLEY RAILROAD COMPANY
• Court: Mississippi Supreme Court

41 So. 383

88 Miss. 687

DANIEL W. BROWN v. YAZOO & MISSISSIPPI VALLEY RAILROAD COMPANY

Supreme Court of Mississippi

July 6, 1906

April 1906

FROM the circuit court of Wilkinson county, HON. MOYSE H WILKINSON, Judge.

Brown the appellant, was plaintiff in the court below; the railroad company, the appellee, was defendant there. From a judgment in defendant's favor the plaintiff appealed to the supreme court. The facts are sufficiently apparent from the opinion of the court.

Reversed and remanded.

Bramlette & Tucker, for appellant.

The appellant, on August 31, 1904, took passage for himself wife, and three small children on defendant's train at Gloster, Mississippi, for Raymond, Mississippi, paying the fare for all of them. When about twelve or fifteen miles from Harrison the car left the track, and was wrecked. One of the children was thrown through the window into a field, and appellant and his wife were thrown over in the car; appellant, when the crash was over, was under the car, with his baby in his arms. The car was turned upside down; appellant was badly bruised and injured; all the cars were wrecked except the sleeper. The above facts are shown by appellant's testimony. There was no other testimony.

Upon this testimony the court below held that plaintiff had not shown that defendant was guilty of negligence, and in this erred. Plaintiff had made out a prima facie case of negligence by showing that the train ran off the track and that he was injured. Hutchinson on Carriers (2d ed.), secs. 800, 801; Railroad v. Trotter, 60 Miss. 442.

Mayes & Longstreet, and C. N. Burch, for appellee.

The question here presented, pure and simple, is, does the mere fact of the happening of an injurious accident to a passenger on a train raise a presumption of negligence against the company, and will the mere proof of this single fact, without any explanation, or showing of any single circumstance which would indicate that the accident was caused by the negligence of the carrier, make out a prima facie case of negligence against the carrier?

A carrier of passengers is not an absolute insurer of a passenger's safety; and it is easy to conceive of many causes which would produce a derailment which would not impose liability on the carrier; the derailment might occur from an extraordinary flood, or from the act of a trespasser or from a latent defect, etc. The very fact that there are reasonable hypotheses in every derailment which would be inconsistent with the idea of any negligence on the part of the carrier, makes it necessary for the plaintiff...