DES MOINES, Iowa (Legal Newsline) - Iowa jurors no longer can be counted upon to understand the basics of livestock management, the state’s highest court ruled, affirming the dismissal of a lawsuit by a truck driver who was injured after his vehicle plowed into a loose cow.
Simranjit Singh was hauling a load of fish in his Peterbilt 18-wheeler early in the morning of Jan. 26, 2019 when a cow wandered onto I-80 and collided with his truck. Singh was injured and sued the cow’s owner, Michael McDermott, for negligence.
Trial and appeals courts dismissed his case, citing a lack of evidence. And the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the dismissal, saying the days are over when Iowa jurors might be able to determine whether a farmer negligently allowed a cow to break loose from the pasture.
Iowa used to have a law requiring farmers to fence in their animals, establishing a duty of care that jurors could easily find had been violated if a cow was roaming free. But legislators repealed that law in 1994, the court said in a Feb. 2 opinion by Justice David May.
Absent a statutory basis for determining liability, courts were left with the ancient common-law principle of res ipsa loquitur, or “the thing speaks for itself.”
The requirements for proving negligence under res ipsa are that the injury was caused by something under the exclusive control and management of the defendant, and the injury wouldn’t have occurred in the “ordinary course of things” absent the defendant’s failure to take care. Plaintiffs must present an expert opinion if jurors can’t be expected to have personal knowledge about the “ordinary course of things,” the court went on, or else the case must be dismissed as a matter of law.
While Singh could prove farmer McDermott owned the cow, he couldn’t prove the cow was actually on McDermott’s land when it broke free. Photographs showed no breaks in McDermott’s fence and only an expert could explain to jurors whether a cow could jump the fence in the ordinary course of things.
“While agriculture remains vitally important to Iowa, few of us work with cattle,” the court concluded. “In any event, we don’t think that the nuances of bovine behavior are so widely understood that a jury of ordinary citizens would be able to say that— `in the ordinary course of things’—a cow would not have escaped without negligence by McDermott.”