A farm whose calf strayed onto a road can be sued for the death of a woman who was struck by a car and died while trying to help the animal, New York’s highest court has ruled in a case that illustrates the concept of legal causation.
Holly Hain stopped her car late one night on the southbound lane of a road in upstate Steuben County to assist a calf that had escaped its closure. Leah Jamison, driving north, collided with Hain, killing her. Hain’s husband sued both Jamison’s mother, who owned the vehicle, and the Drumm Family Farm, which owned the calf, for negligence.
The trial court refused a request by Drumm to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that it could not conclude that the woman’s leaving her car in the road was sufficiently removed from the calf’s escape as to rule out the farm as a cause of the accident. The Appellate Division overturned the ruling, finding that the farm did not cause the accident.
But the Court of Appeals disagreed. “The very same risk that rendered negligent the farm’s alleged failure to restrain or retrieve its farm animal – namely, that the wandering calf would enter a roadway and cause a collision – was, in fact, the risk that came to fruition,” Judge Leslie Stein wrote on behalf of six of her colleagues in a ruling decided Dec. 22. “That the Farm could not predict the exact manner in which the calf would cause injury to a motorist does not preclude liability because the general risk and character of injuries was foreseeable.”
At issue before the court was the concept of so-called proximate causation. Even if Hain’s husband could show that Drumm had a responsibility to prevent the calf from entering the road and that the farm failed to uphold that responsibility, the husband still needed to establish that the Drumm’s negligence caused his wife’s injury.
The requirement of proximate causation promotes fairness. In short, would it be fair to make the Drumm’s pay for the injury to Holly Hain? The answer, as the Court of Appeals explained, turns on whether the harm is foreseeable and, in cases like this one, whether the intervening act – Jamison’s driving her car into Hain – is itself a foreseeable consequence of the conditions created by Drumm’s negligence.
An injury with more than one cause requires the judges to determine whether the intervening act has severed the chain of causation. As Stein explained, factors that inform the determination include the foreseeability of the event resulting in injury; the passage of time between the originally negligent act and the intervening act; whether the original act of negligence was completed or ongoing at the time of the intervening act; and what, if any, other forces combined to produce the harm.
Cases in which the intervening acts are said to sever the chain of causation have one of two distinguishing features, the court noted. First, the risk created by the original negligence did not produce the harm. (A bus driver who hits a wheelchair-bound plaintiff does not cause the injuries that arise form the plaintiff’s use of a defective replacement wheelchair.) Or second, the initial act of negligence has ceased, such as when a defendant negligently causes a vehicular accident, and the plaintiff has reached a position of safety only to be injured in a second accident.
In the case of Holly Hain, a jury “could reasonably conclude decedent’s actions in exiting her vehicle and entering the roadway were an entirely ‘normal or foreseeable consequence of the situation created by the defendant’s [Drumm’s] negligence,’” the court noted (citations omitted).