Tetro v. Town of Stratford

• Decision Date: 05 April 1983
• Citation: 189 Conn. 601,458 A.2d 5
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court
• Parties: Joseph TETRO v. TOWN OF STRATFORD et al.

Page 5

458 A.2d 5

189 Conn. 601

Joseph TETRO v. TOWN OF STRATFORD et al.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

April 5, 1983.

Richard P. Gilardi, Town Counsel, with whom, on the brief, was Thomas C. Thornberry, Asst. Town Atty., for appellants (defendants).

T. Paul Tremont, Bridgeport, with whom, on the brief, was Robert R. Sheldon, Bridgeport, for appellee (plaintiff).

Before PETERS, PARSKEY, SHEA, GRILLO and DALY, JJ.

PETERS, Associate Justice.

This case involves the liability of police officers, and the town by which they are employed, for injuries arising out of a police pursuit of a suspected law violator. The plaintiff, Joseph Tetro, brought an action alleging negligence on the part of the individual defendants, Anthony Rich and William Thornton, and vicarious liability on the part of their employer, the town of Stratford. ¹ After a trial, a jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff in the amount of $59,000. The defendants are appealing from the adverse judgment which followed from the trial court's denial of their motion to set aside the jury's verdict and to enter a directed verdict in their behalf.

The jury might reasonably have found the following facts. The defendants Rich and Thornton, members of the Stratford police department, were in their patrol car on March 4, 1975, at about 12 noon, when they observed a green Chevrolet parked in a shopping center parking lot off Stratford Avenue. They thought the Chevrolet might have been stolen because the boys in the car looked too young to have valid drivers' licenses. ² When the police approached the Chevrolet to make inquiries, the boys drove off. The police car pursued the Chevrolet, with the police car's siren working and revolving dome light flashing. Both the fleeing and the pursuing car reached speeds of approximately fifty miles per hour.

When the Chevrolet left the parking lot, it headed west on Stratford Avenue, toward Bridgeport, in a densely populated urban area. At the Stratford/Bridgeport town line, Stratford Avenue bifurcates, with Stratford Avenue becoming one way easterly, and Connecticut Avenue becoming one way westerly. The Chevrolet, with the police car in close pursuit, proceeded westerly, the wrong way, on Stratford Avenue, until the Chevrolet collided with two cars including that of the plaintiff Tetro. The plaintiff, who had been driving his car in a lawful manner, heard the police car's siren but was unable to determine its source before his car was struck head-on.

With regard to the defendants' failure to exercise due care, the jury could reasonably have found that the town of Stratford had adopted, prior to this accident, a policy concerning the conduct of high speed chases by police officers. That policy urged police officers to avoid high speed chases as much as possible, and to consider, before undertaking such pursuit, the nature of the underlying offense and the dangers that might attend pursuit. When a high speed pursuit was made, all safety precautions were to be used. According to the opinion of an expert witness, a member of the Stratford police department, the high speed chase that was conducted in this case by Rich and Thornton was in violation of the Stratford policy.

The defendants' appeal does not directly challenge the propriety of the jury's conclusion that their conduct was negligent. The defendants claim instead that the evidence was insufficient, for three reasons, to establish the necessary causal link between their acts or omissions and the injuries sustained by the plaintiff. They argue that proximate cause was lacking because of: (1) the intervening negligence of the driver of the pursued car; (2) the lack of connection between the plaintiff's injuries and the defendants' operation of the police car; and (3) the immunity conferred, as a matter of public policy, upon emergency vehicles in pursuit of law violators. Therefore, the defendants maintain, the court was required to resolve the issue of proximate cause in their favor as a matter of law. We do not agree.

The defendants' first claim of error is that, according to the Connecticut law on causation and the rulings of other jurisdictions in police pursuit cases, the sole proximate cause of the plaintiff's injury was the negligent driving of the pursued car, the Chevrolet, for which the defendants cannot legally be held responsible. Recognizing that, in application, this case is one of first impression for this court, we are nonetheless unpersuaded by the authorities upon which the defendants rely.

The Connecticut law of causation was recently restated in Coburn v. Lenox Homes, Inc., 186 Conn. 370, 382-84, 441 A.2d 620 (1982), where we held (at pp. 383-84, 441 A.2d 620) that "[m]ore than one proximate cause may result in any harm suffered.... An actual cause that is a substantial factor in the resulting harm is a proximate cause of that harm.... Proximate cause is ordinarily a question of fact.... The test for finding proximate cause 'is whether the harm which occurred was of the same general nature as the foreseeable risk created by the defendant's negligence.' ... The foreseeable risk may include the acts of the plaintiff and of third parties." In earlier cases, we have specifically addressed the effect of a third party's intervening negligence. We have consistently adhered to the standard of 2 Restatement (Second), Torts § 442B (1965) that a negligent defendant, whose conduct creates or increases the risk of a particular harm and is a substantial factor in causing that harm, is not relieved from liability by the intervention of another person, except where the harm is intentionally caused by the third person and is not within the scope of the risk created by the defendant's conduct. Kiniry v. Danbury Hospital, 183 Conn. 448, 445, 439 A.2d 408 (1981); Merhi v. Becker, 164 Conn. 516, 522, 325 A.2d 270 (1973); Miranti v. Brookside Shopping Center, Inc., 159 Conn. 24, 28, 266 A.2d 370 (1969). These authorities ³ make it clear that the recklessness of the operator of the pursued car, the Chevrolet, does not relieve the defendants of liability because the trier of fact may find that the plaintiff's injury falls within the scope of the risk created by their negligent conduct in maintaining a police pursuit at high speeds in the wrong direction on a busy one-way street.

Recent cases in other jurisdictions have similarly refused to limit police liability for negligent conduct of a high speed chase, as a matter of law, to collisions involving the police vehicle itself. See Myers v. Town of Harrison, 438 F.2d 293, 297 (2d Cir.1971); Schatz v. Cutler, 395 F.Supp. 271, 275 (D.Vt.1975); City of Sacramento v. Superior Court of the State of California, 131 Cal.App.3d 395, 405-406, 182 Cal.Rptr. 443 (1982) (expressly limiting the earlier California cases upon which the defendants rely); Reed v. Winter Park, 253 So.2d 475, 477 (Fla.App.1971); Selkowitz v. County of Nassau, 45 N.Y.2d 97, 101-102, 408 N.Y.S.2d 10, 379 N.E.2d 1140 (1978); Mason v. Bitton, 85 Wash.2d 321, 326, 534 P.2d 1360 (1975). The cases to the contrary, now in the minority, are by and large both older and, in our view, less well-reasoned. See United States v. Hutchins, 268 F.2d 69, 72 (6th Cir.1959); West Virginia v. Fidelity & Casualty Co. of New York, 263 F.Supp. 88, 90-91 (S.D.W.Va.1967); Chambers v. Ideal Pure Milk Co., 245 S.W.2d 589, 590-91 (Ky.1952); Roll v. Timberman, 94 N.J.Super. 530, 535-37, 229 A.2d 281 (1967). The intervention of negligent or even reckless behavior by the driver of the car whom the police pursue does not, under the emergent majority view, require the conclusion that there is a lack of proximate cause between police negligence and an innocent victim's injuries.

The trial court was therefore not in error in permitting the jury to determine the question of proximate cause as a matter of fact, despite the intervening negligence or recklessness of the driver of the Chevrolet. For related reasons, the defendants' second claim of error is also unpersuasive. That argument asserts that no proximate relationship can be found to have existed between the plaintiff's injuries and the defendants' operation of their pursuit vehicle unless the operation of the vehicle itself constituted the danger to the injured party.

As a common law proposition, the principles that govern proximate causation as we have noted, do not limit the foreseeable risk attendant to a defendant's negligent conduct to his own acts, but may encompass the acts "of the plaintiff and of third parties." Coburn v. Lenox Homes, Inc., supra, 186 Conn. 384, 441 A.2d 620. The zone of risk for negligent conduct is not automatically confined to physical contact between the injured party and the defendants' own vehicle. There is no viable distinction between the defendants' assertion, in their first claim of error, that they bear no responsibility for the negligence of the fleeing driver, and their assertion here that they bear no responsibility for injuries not caused by their police car.

The defendants argue, however, that these common law principles are, for emergency vehicles like police cars, superseded by the provisions of General Statutes § 14-283. ⁴ That statute defines the term "emergency vehicle" to include a "local police vehicle ... in the pursuit of fleeing law violators," and the plaintiff has not challenged its general applicability to this case. The statute, in subsection (b), permits the operator of an emergency vehicle, in disregard of traffic laws, inter alia, to "proceed past any red light or stop signal or stop sign ... exceed the posted speed limits ... and ... disregard ... regulations governing direction of movement or turning in specific directions." The subsection limits even this authority, however, by providing that the operator, in passing through traffic lights, must slow down "to the extent necessary for the safe operation of such [emergency] vehicle" and in exceeding...