INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) – Tyson Foods won’t be liable for a car wreck that involved a 92-year-old man striking a motorcycle.
Despite tall grass that a police officer said would have kept Harold Moistner from entering an intersection and striking Walter Reece’s bike, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Sept. 21 that the poultry giant did not create an “unreasonable risk” under state common law.
The tall grass was completely contained on Tyson’s property and, thus, the company owed no duty to the public, Chief Justice Loretta Rush wrote. Previous decisions that determined otherwise are wrong and “we disapprove them,” Rush wrote.
“(O)ur holding in no way prevents the General Assembly or local legislative bodies from enacting statutes or ordinances to impose a duty on landowners to refrain from creating or maintaining visual obstructions on land adjacent to highways in favor of the motoring public,” Rush added.
“We hold only that Indiana common law imposes no such duty.”
Rush says the ruling is confined to visual obstructions that do not come into contact with motorists.
Tyson Fresh Meats owns a property in Wayne County adjacent to where Walter Reece suffered catastrophic brain injuries from a wreck with Moistner as Moistner performed a U-turn in 2014.
The company had stopped mowing the area near a drainage ditch after the retirement of an employee two years before the wreck.
Reece’s wife, as his guardian, first sued Moistner, then added Tyson and others in an amended complaint. Tyson was the last defendant standing before moving for summary judgment, which was granted by the trial court and affirmed by the state Court of Appeals.
The grass in issue grew in a ditch that had been dredged and cleaned at various times but didn’t extend to the road, the decision says.
“Precedent has touched upon various aspects of landowners’ duty to nearby motorists: harms physically intruding upon the roadways, the lack of duty to continually inspect the land’s perimeter, third parties’ versus agents’ negligence, situations involving a landowner’s trees in densely populated areas, a land’s artificial versus natural conditions, and conditions confined to the land,” Rush wrote.
“Some of those cases use broad language to support narrow holdings, while others conflict with one another. Yet, despite any inconsistencies, our common law has always sought to delicately balance owners’ property rights with the motoring public’s safety—without imposing undue or unreasonable burdens on either.”