## Facts

- Pedro Nieves DeJesus drove at night with his wife as a passenger and struck a stationary, dark, unlighted railroad tank car blocking a public highway.
- The train was temporarily stopped so the tank car straddled the roadway; the engine was several hundred feet from the crossing.
- The crossing lacked automatic warning signals and lacked adequate lighting.
- The DeJesuses alleged the railroad failed to place required nighttime visual warning devices as mandated by Fla. Stat. § 357.08 for trains blocking highways after dark.
- The railroad asserted contributory negligence, claiming DeJesus failed to see and avoid the train.

## Issues

1. Whether violation of Fla. Stat. § 357.08 should be treated as negligence per se or only as evidence of negligence in a civil negligence action.
2. Whether the trial court properly instructed the jury that violation of § 357.08 “is negligence,” leaving causation and contributory negligence for the jury.

## Decision

- The Florida Supreme Court quashed the district court’s reversal and remanded with directions to reinstate the plaintiffs’ jury verdict.
- The court held that statutory violations (other than strict-liability statutes) may constitute negligence per se or may be evidence of negligence, depending on the statute’s purpose and scope.
- The court concluded § 357.08 is the type of safety statute whose violation may be treated as negligence per se when its criteria are met and the plaintiff suffers the harm the statute seeks to prevent.
- The trial court’s negligence-per-se instruction was permissible because the jury still decided whether the statute was violated and whether that violation legally caused the injuries, along with any contributory negligence.

## Legal Principles

- A statutory violation constitutes negligence per se when the statute (1) is not a strict-liability statute and (2) creates a specific duty to take precautions (3) to protect a particular class of persons (4) from a particular type of injury.
- For negligence per se based on a statutory violation, the plaintiff must show membership in the protected class, injury of the type the statute was designed to prevent, and proximate causation.
- When negligence per se applies, a court may instruct that violation is negligence as a matter of law, while reserving for the jury factual determinations on violation, causation, and defenses such as contributory negligence.
- Violations of statutes that do not establish this kind of targeted protective duty are generally treated as evidence of negligence rather than negligence per se.

## Conclusion

The court held that Florida’s nighttime highway-blocking warning statute can support negligence per se because it targets protection of nighttime motorists from collisions with hard-to-see trains blocking the road; therefore, the jury instruction treating violation as negligence was proper, and the plaintiffs’ verdict was reinstated.


DeJesus v. Seaboard Coast Line R.R. Co., 281 So. 2d 198 (Fla. 1973)