John Flannelly v. Delaware Hudson Company

• Decision Date: 10 June 1912
• Docket Number: No. 132,132
• Parties: JOHN FLANNELLY and Mary Ellen Flannelly, Petitioners, v. DELAWARE & HUDSON COMPANY
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

225 U.S. 597

32 S.Ct. 783

56 L.Ed. 1221

JOHN FLANNELLY and Mary Ellen Flannelly, Petitioners,

v DELAWARE & HUDSON COMPANY.

No. 132.

Argued December 19 and 20, 1911.

Decided June 10, 1912.

Messrs. Frank W. Hackett and Paul J. Sherwood for petitioners.

[Argument of Counsel from page 598 intentionally omitted] Messrs. James H. Torrey, W. S. Opdyke, and Lewis E. Carr for respondent.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 599-601 intentionally omitted] Mr. Justice Van Devanter delivered the opinion of the court:

This was an action to recover damages for injuries and loss occasioned, as was alleged, by negligence of a railroad company, resulting in the collision of one of its trains with a vehicle passing over a grade crossing in Pennsylvania. The negligence charged against the defendant was the failure to give due and timely warning of the approach of the train, and the defense interposed was the freedom of the defendant from the negligence charged, and the failure of one of the plaintiffs, who was driving the vehicle, to take reasonable precautions, before attempting to drive over the crossing, to ascertain whether she could do so in safety. In the circuit court there was a verdict and judgment for the plaintiffs, and the defendant took the case on a writ of error to the circuit court of appeals. That court treated the record as presenting, in substance, two questions: First, whether there was any substantial evidence of actionable negligence on the part of the defendant, and, second, whether the evidence conclusively established the defense of contributory negligence. Upon examining the evidence purporting to be set out in the record, the circuit court of appeals answered the first question favorably to the plaintiffs and the second favorably to the defendant, and accordingly reversed the judgment. ——L.R.A.(N.S.) ——, 97 C.C.A. 112, 172 Fed. 328. The case was then brought here on a writ of certiorari granted on the petition of the plaintiffs.

Assuming, but without so deciding, that the state of the record was such as to justify the circuit court of appeals in examining the evidence and determining whether it conclusively established the defense of contributory negligence, we come to consider whether that question was rightly decided.

As is often true in such cases, some matters were not disputed at the trial, while others were the subject of conflicting testimony or of testimony from which different inferences reasonably could be drawn. The matters not disputed were these: The injury occurred in the daytime, at a grade crossing in a small country village. The defendant's tracks, which were three in number, ran in a northerly and southerly direction and crossed the highway at right angles. About 700 feet south of the crossing the tracks curved to the west, and when cars were occupying the east track south of the crossing a traveler on the highway east of the crossing could not see a train approaching from the south on either side of the other tracks. Mrs....