Washington Railway Electric Company v. Ann Catherine Scala

• Decision Date: 11 June 1917
• Docket Number: No. 826,826
• Citation: 61 L.Ed. 1360,244 U.S. 630,37 S.Ct. 654
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court
• Parties: WASHINGTON RAILWAY & ELECTRIC COMPANY, Plff. in Err., v. ANN CATHERINE SCALA, Administratrix of the Estate of Alvin Joseph Scala, Deceased

244 U.S. 630

37 S.Ct. 654

61 L.Ed. 1360

WASHINGTON RAILWAY & ELECTRIC COMPANY, Plff. in Err.,

v ANN CATHERINE SCALA, Administratrix of the Estate of Alvin Joseph Scala, Deceased.

No. 826.

Argued May 8, 1917.

Decided June 11, 1917.

[Syllabus from page 630 intentionally omitted]

Mr. John S. Barbour for plaintiff in error.

[Argument of council from pages 630-634 intentionally omitted] Messrs. Daniel W. O'Donoghue and Arthur A. Alexander for defendant in error.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 634-636 intentionally omitted] Mr. Justice Clarke delivered the opinion of the court:

This case is before us on writ of error to the court of appeals for the District of Columbia, and we shall refer to the parties as they appeared in the trial court, the defendant in error as plaintiff and the plaintiff in error as defendant.

On July 8, 1913, the plaintiff's decedent was a conductor in the employ of the defendant, a common carrier of passengers by an electric railroad, with termini as hereinafter described, and when standing or moving along the 'running or stepping board' of an open summer car, in the evening, after dark, his body in some manner struck against one of the poles supporting the overhead wires and he was so injured that he died within an hour.

The negligence charged in the third and fourth counts of the declaration on which the case was tried is the placing of the poles so close to the track that the decedent did not have a reasonably safe place in which to discharge the duties required of him, and the allegations of these counts bring the case within the Federal Employers' Liability Act, approved April 22, 1908 (35 Stat. at L. 65, chap. 149), as amended April 5, 1910 (36 Stat. at L. 291, chap. 143, Comp. Stat. 1916, § 8662).

A motion by the defendant in error to dismiss the writ of error for want of jurisdiction and a petition filed by the plaintiff in error for a writ of certiorari, both of which were postponed to the hearing on the merits, are denied.

Coming to the merits of the case we are confronted with eighteen claims of error, which, however, resolve themselves into but three of substance sufficient to call for attention, viz.:

(1) That the defendant at the time of the accident was not a 'common carrier by railroad' within the meaning of the Federal Employers' Liability Act of April 22, 1908.

(2) That the trial court erred in permitting the plaintiff to amend her declaration on the trial, after all the testimony had been introduced, and at a time more than two years after the accident had occurred, by inserting a claim for 'conscious pain and suffering' of the deceased.

This amendment, it is claimed, in effect allowed a recovery on a second and new cause of action after it was barred by the two years' limitation of the act.

(3) That the court erred in submitting the case to the jury, for the reason that no substantial evidence of engligence was introduced on the trial.

Four acts of Congress, the first providing for the incorporation of the defendant company and the other three amending the first, were introduced in evidence on the theory that they were private acts and otherwise would not be before this court.

With these acts and the evidence and admissions shown in the record before us, it is clear that the defendant was incorporated as, and at the time of the accident complained of was, a railway company, not a street railway company; that it had full powers of eminent domain; that at the time of the accident complained of it owned and operated a line of electric railway extending from a terminus within the District of Columbia to a terminus at Cabin John creek, in the state of Maryland, a large part of the line being constructed on a private right of way, and that it was at that time a common carrier of passengers for hire between its termini.

It is argued that under the decision in Omaha & C. B. Street R. Co. v. Interstate Commerce Commission, 230 U. S. 324, 57 L. ed. 1501, 46 L.R.A.(N.S.) 385, 33 Sup. Ct. Rep. 890, the railway of the defendant was a street railroad, and that therefore the defendant was not a 'common carrier by railroad' within the terms of the Act of 1908 as amended. That case dealt with a purely street railway in the streets of two cities, and the decision was that it was not a 'railroad' such as was intended to be placed under the jurisdiction of the Interstate Commerce Commission by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 [24 Stat. at L. 379, chap. 104, Comp. Stat. 1916, § 8563]. The case is of negligible value in determining either the construction of the act we are considering in this case, or the classification of the defendant, which clearly enough is a suburban railroad common carrier of passengers within the scope of the Federal Employers' Liability Act, as is sufficiently decided by United States v. Baltimore & O. S. W. R. Co. 226 U. S. 14, 57 L. ed....