LANSING, Mich. (Legal Newsline) - A 14-year-old who failed to hear the whistle of an oncoming train because he was listening to music on his earbuds can sue the railroad for failing to stop in time, a Michigan appeals court ruled.
The March 10 decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed a trial court’s dismissal of the case, saying the lower court misinterpreted an 1899 decision by the Michigan Supreme Court involving a deaf man who had been hit by a railroad handcart.
Plaintiff Jacob Marion habitually walked down the railroad tracks between his home and school, the court said. One day, a train approached as he was walking with earbuds in his ear. From about a mile away, the engineer started sounding his horn. Less than a second before the train hit Marion, the engineer engaged the emergency brakes, too late to prevent a collision.
“The central question presented in this appeal is whether a train operator has a duty to attempt to preserve the life of a trespasser in peril on the tracks,” the appeals court said. The railroad said the train crew didn’t have a duty to slow the train until they determined a collision was “imminent,” the appeals court said, but “the caselaw does not support such a rule.”
A plaintiff expert said the engineer could have stopped the train in time if he had activated the emergency brake when he first saw Marion wasn’t responding to the warning horn. But a trial judge dismissed the case, citing Piskorowski v Detroit, Grand Haven & Milwaukee, which held a railroad couldn’t be liable for an accident where a handcart hit a deaf man who wasn’t expecting it to come from that direction.
In that case, Michigan’s high court said the men operating the handcart yelled out warnings but couldn’t have been expected to know the person they were yelling at was deaf.
Even before Piskorowski was decided, however, Michigan courts had ruled that railroads had a heightened duty to protect children and people with mental disabilities who wandered on to their tracks. An 1885 decision held a railroad could be liable after train operators noticed what they thought was a stick on the tracks but failed to slow down enough to stop when they realized it was a child, for example.
Adults generally were barred from suing under the doctrine of contributory negligence, which protected defendants against liability if the plaintiff bore any responsibility for his injuries.
The Michigan Supreme Court abolished contributory negligence in 1979, however, replacing it with a test balancing the social utility of imposing liability on the defendant versus the social cost. While railroads have a lower standard of care toward trespassers walking on their tracks, the appeals court said, that doesn’t mean they have no duty to try and prevent accidents when it is clear someone isn’t heeding their warnings.
“Measured against this standard, there should be no debate that a train engineer has a duty to stop or slow down when a person in a train’s path fails to respond to a warning signal,” the court said.
Whether the train could have stopped in time is a fact question only a jury can decide, the court concluded.