## Facts

- Sergio Salinas worked for Classic Dairy as a truck driver and also helped with cattle-feeding operations when not driving.
- During a feeding operation, a truck pulled trailers stacked with hay bales while one worker dropped bales from the top; Salinas and others handled and prepared the bales on the ground.
- Salinas was struck and injured by a falling bale of hay.
- Testimony about how the accident occurred was sharply conflicting, including whether Salinas was behind the truck picking up a bale or was pulling a bale from beneath the truck when he was hit.
- Salinas sued the owners (Richard and Norma Vierstra) and employees, alleging negligent failure to supervise, regulate, and inspect working conditions; defendants denied negligence and asserted Salinas’s own negligence.

## Issues

1. Whether the evidence permitted the jury to find defendants were not negligent or that any negligence was not a proximate cause of Salinas’s injuries.
2. Whether the case was properly submitted under Idaho comparative negligence principles, including how assumption-of-risk concepts were presented to the jury.
3. Whether alleged instructional or trial errors required reversal despite the defense verdict.

## Decision

- The Idaho Supreme Court affirmed the judgment for defendants.
- The Court held that resolving the conflicting accounts of the accident was for the jury, and the record supported the jury’s finding that defendants committed no negligent act that proximately caused Salinas’s injuries.
- The Court concluded that challenged instructions and related trial rulings did not amount to reversible error; given the finding of no defendant negligence, any alleged comparative-fault/assumption-of-risk defects were not outcome-determinative.

## Legal Principles

- When evidence on negligence and causation is materially conflicting, the jury determines the facts, and an appellate court will not reweigh credibility or substitute its view of what happened.
- Employer/owner liability for workplace injury turns on breach of a duty of reasonable care and proximate cause; a verdict finding no negligent act causing injury will be upheld if supported by the evidence.
- In a comparative negligence system, conduct described as assumption of risk is generally treated within comparative fault (reducing recovery if defendant negligence is found), rather than as an automatic bar, absent special circumstances such as express assumption of risk.
- Instructional error warrants reversal only if it misstates law or likely affected the verdict; where the jury finds no defendant negligence, claimed errors on apportionment defenses are typically harmless.

## Conclusion

The court upheld a defense verdict in a workplace-injury negligence case because the jury could reasonably resolve conflicting evidence to find no defendant negligence causing the injury, and the alleged problems in comparative-fault and assumption-of-risk instructions did not justify a new trial.


Salinas v. Vierstra, 695 P.2d 369 (Idaho 1985)