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
- 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.
- 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.