Porter v. Price, 9151
| Decision Date | 24 August 1960 |
| Docket Number | No. 9151,9151 |
| Parties | d 80 Leo PORTER and Nora Porter, Plaintiffs and Appellants, v. Hyrum PRICE, Defendant and Respondent. |
| Court | Utah Supreme Court |
George B. Handy, Ogden, for appellants.
Kipp & Charlier, Salt Lake City, for respondent.
Plaintiffs sued defendant charging that he negligently ran his car into the car in which they were parked. From jury verdict and judgment in favor of defendant plaintiffs appeal.
On January 29, 1958, the defendant, Hyrum Price, had been a diabetic for 17 years. While he was driving his own automobile through the streets of Ogden, he suffered a severe insulin reaction which caused him to lose control of his automobile and to crash into the automobile of the plaintiff, Leo Porter, which was facing in the opposite direction and parked at the curb on the opposite side of the street from the lane in which the defendant had been traveling, damaging the car of said Leo Porter and injuring the plaintiff, Nora Porter, who was seated inside the parked car.
The appellants contend that 1) the verdict of the jury is contrary to the evidence, 2) the court erred in instructing the jury on unavoidable accidents, 3) the court erred in failing to give certain requested instructions.
The verdict of the jury must not be set aside unless a reasonable man could not come to the same conclusion even when all of the evidence and the inferences fairly derived therefrom are taken in the light most favorable to the defendant. There was sufficient evidence to the effect that Mr. Price was a well-regulated diabetic, that his routine on the day of the accident was no different than usual, that his prior insulin reactions were of a mild degree, and had never incapacitated him, and were always preceded by warning symptoms, that the severe reaction which occurred on the day of the accident had never happened to him before, that he had no reason to think it ever would happen to him, that it happened without warning, that it is a rare occurrence generally and that its likelihood of happening to him was therefore not great enough to cause a reasonable man to act any differently than he acted. This evidence, if believed, is ample foundation to support the jury's refusal to find Mr. Price negligent.
In support of their second point, the appellants cite the California case of Butigan v. Yellow Cab Co., 49 Cal.2d 652, 320 P.2d 500, 505, 65 A.L.R.2d 1, the case most closely in line with their contention that the court erred in instructing the jury on unavoidable accidents. However, even in the Butigan case, after declaring that such an instruction should be disapproved, the court stated, 'The determination whether, in a specific instance, the probable effect of the instruction has been to mislead the jury and whether the error has been prejudicial so as to require reversal depends on all the circumstances of the case, including the evidence and the other instructions given.' In that case there was substantial evidence of negligence by the defendants, and there was almost no affirmative evidence that the accident resulted from any cause other than those circumstances which were under the control of an ordinary prudent man, yet the jury decided for the defendant. The court stressed this inconsistency in deciding that the instruction was prejudicial error, and such inconsistency is not present in the instant case. Here, much of the evidence tended to show circumstances beyond the control of a reasonable man and the jury decided, accordingly. Also, in the Butigan case, the instructions themselves were misleading in...
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