The Chicago v. Wood

• Decision Date: 11 April 1903
• Docket Number: 13,047
• Citation: 66 Kan. 613,72 P. 215
• Court: Kansas Supreme Court
• Parties: THE CHICAGO, ROCK ISLAND & PACIFIC RAILWAY COMPANY v. ELIAS WOOD

72 P. 215

66 Kan. 613

THE CHICAGO, ROCK ISLAND & PACIFIC RAILWAY COMPANY v. ELIAS WOOD

No. 13,047

Supreme Court of Kansas

April 11, 1903

Decided January, 1903.

Error from Butler district court; G. P. AIKMAN, judge.

Judgment affirmed.

SYLLABUS

SYLLABUS BY THE COURT.

1. EVIDENCE -- Circumstantial -- Question for Jury. In the solution of questions of fact dependent upon circumstantial evidence, the jury must be left to decide which of two equally plausible conclusions, deducible from such circumstances, shall be adopted.

2. EVIDENCE -- Civil Case -- Degree of Certainty. Circumstantial evidence in a civil case, in order to be sufficient to sustain a verdict, need not rise to that degree of certainty which will exclude every reasonable conclusion other than the one arrived at by the jury.

M. A Low, W. F. Evans, and Paul E. Walker, for plaintiff in error.

E. N. Smith, and Houston & Brooks, for defendant in error.

CUNNINGHAM J. JOHNSTON, C.J., GREENE, POLLOCK, BURCH, MASON, JJ., concurring. SMITH, J., dissenting.

OPINION

CUNNINGHAM, J.

The facts of this case are as follows: In company with his wife, the defendant in error alighted from a south-bound train of the plaintiff in error at its depot at Whitewater, Kan., before it was light on the morning of August 24, 1898. There was no agent, nor was there any light in the depot or on the platform. Desiring to remain until it should become light, Mr. Wood and his wife found their way into the waiting-room of the depot. The depot was west of the track and had a door on both the east and west sides. It was surrounded with a platform about eight feet wide, that on the south being three and one-half feet from the ground. There was no railing about the platform. Mrs. Wood was at the time suffering from a diarrhea. Soon after the parties had entered the waiting-room Mr. Wood heard cries from his wife from the outside. This was the first he knew that she had left the room. He responded immediately, and found that she had fallen from the platform south of the east door of the waiting-room, and in the fall had sustained severe injuries. This was all the evidence in the case bearing upon the question of how the accident occurred. The defendant in error was awarded a verdict by the jury.

The negligence charged by the plaintiff was that the railway company did not maintain lights on the platform or in the waiting-room, nor maintain guard-rails around its platform, and that it failed to provide water-closets for the use of its passengers, and did not keep an agent on duty to give information to passengers where to find the water-closets or to direct them how to leave the depot platform with safety in the dark. The railway company requested the court to instruct the jury to return a verdict in its favor on the theory that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant a recovery by the plaintiff. This was refused.

The plaintiff's theory was that Mrs. Wood left the waiting-room for the purpose of finding a water-closet where she might conveniently and properly answer the call of nature, and in so doing, being unacquainted with the depot and surroundings and without the advice of any one as to where to find the closets, and without a light to guide her, she, in groping around in the dark, fell from the platform and suffered the injuries complained of. The plaintiff in error, however, while tacitly admitting that were these assumed facts sufficiently shown it would be liable, claims that there is not sufficient evidence to warrant the jury in awarding damages on the assumption of the correctness of this theory. It contends that there are other theories as plausible and as consistent with the facts shown which would explain the result in a manner that would relieve the company from responsibility, and insists that, where a party relies upon circumstantial evidence to prove his case, those circumstances must not only be such as reasonably to lead to the conclusion arrived at by the jury, but that such conclusion must be the only reasonable conclusion consistent with the evidence; that, where the evidence is purely circumstantial and is equally consistent with a theory acquitting the defendant of liability as with one making it liable, plaintiff cannot recover. It points out one theory which would account for the happening of the accident on the hypothesis of the company's being free from negligence, or, at least, upon the hypothesis that the plaintiff's wife was guilty of such contributory negligence as would bar recovery.

In support of its contention, plaintiff in error cites Asbach v. The Chicago, B. & Q. Ry. Co., 74 Iowa 248, 37 N.W. 182; Carruthers v. C. R. I. & P. Rly. Co., 55 Kan. 600, 40 P. 915; Railway Co. v. Rhoades, 64 id. 553, 68 P. 58. We are very sure that the two cases cited from this court do not sustain this claim, nor do we think the Iowa case does. While some of the language in that case seems to sustain the view of the plaintiff in error, when the facts of the case are examined it will be seen that such language must not be taken to state a general rule.

Circumstantial evidence in a civil case, in order to be sufficient to sustain the verdict of a jury, need not rise to that degree of certainty which will exclude any and every other reasonable hypothesis. The jury are not infrequently called on to decide between two or more...