Roskee v. Mt. Tom Sulphite Pulp Co.

• Decision Date: 23 November 1897
• Parties: ROSKEE v. MT. TOM SULPHITE PULP CO.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

169 Mass. 528

48 N.E. 766

ROSKEE v. MT. TOM SULPHITE PULP CO.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Hampshire.

November 23, 1897

COUNSEL

A.L. Green and W.C. Heywood, for plaintiff.

Brooks & Hamilton, for defendant.

OPINION

HOLMES J.

This is an action of tort for the loss of the plaintiff's fingers, caused, as the plaintiff alleges, by the jumping of a table on which boards were placed to be sawed by a circular saw in charge of the plaintiff. Both parties tried the case on the footing that the table was in the same condition as when the plaintiff began his employment at it, a considerable time before. But the defendant said that the table was safe unless it had been left unscrewed by the plaintiff or a fellow workman on the occasion of changing saws; the plaintiff said that it was unsafe from the beginning by reason of certain defects. We assume that there was evidence to warrant each view of the facts. The defendant's evidence also tended to show that the accident could not have happened as alleged, and that it happened in a different way. If the plaintiff's evidence had been believed by the jury, we are at a loss to see how he could have avoided the objection that the danger was obvious, and that the proximate cause of the injury was his own negligence in continuing to work on the machine. Or, if the accident had been due to the failure to screw the table firmly down after it had been unscrewed in order to change saws, the neglect must have been the plaintiff's own or that of a fellow workman. The defendant furnished sufficient bolts and nuts. But the judge left the case to the jury, and in his charge instructed them that, if the machine was in an improper condition at the time when the plaintiff came into the defendant's employ, "if you find it was out of repair in such a way as to be carelessness on the part of the defendant, and if you find it continued in that condition and was not put in repair afterwards, why then you may find that the corporation was negligent in that respect." At the end of the charge the plaintiff requested this additional ruling "If the table had been in a dangerous condition owing to lack of bolts and looseness of parts, etc., and had been in such a condition so long that the company knew, or ought to have known, its condition, and from the length of time that it remained in that condition knew, or ought to have known, that its servants were not repairing it, defendant was negligent in not having the repairs made." This was refused, and the plaintiff excepted.

So far as appears, the judge properly refused the ruling, on the ground that it was an attempt to get a last word with the jury when the proper time for requests for...