Auto negligence; Causation; Crossing over the yellow line; Reasonable inference vs impermissible conjecture

The court agreed “that plaintiffs failed to establish causation, and that the trial court erred by denying [defendants’] pretrial motions for summary disposition, directed verdict, JNOV, and for a new trial.” Thus, it vacated the judgment in favor of plaintiffs, holding defendants liable for injuries to plaintiff-Brown and awarding damages of $9,512,590.35, and remanded for entry of an order granting judgment in favor of defendants. There “were no witnesses who saw how Brown was injured, and Brown himself does not remember what happened. There was no physical evidence establishing that any portion of [defendant-] Comstock’s truck or trailer (or the equipment on the trailer) made contact with any part of Brown’s body; nor did any experts conclude that Brown’s injuries were caused by contact with a moving vehicle or trailer (or, assuming contact, how the contact occurred).” Plaintiffs argued “that the jury was permitted to presume, from Comstock’s alleged violation of a traffic statute, that he had acted negligently, and to infer that Brown was not negligent because of his inability to recall what happened.” The court noted that “presumptions, even if they apply in this case, go to the issues of duty, breach, and comparative fault, not causation-in-fact.” Plaintiffs argued that because a witness “saw Brown lying on the ground immediately after Comstock’s truck passed, the jury could reasonably conclude Comstock’s alleged negligence must have caused Brown’s injury.” Although that explanation was “not inconsistent with the facts presented at trial, plaintiffs did not produce evidence to ‘exclude other reasonable hypotheses with a fair amount of certainty,’ and plaintiff’s theory is not deducible as a ‘reasonable inference.’” In other words, plaintiffs merely speculated “and invited the jury to speculate—about how Brown was injured. There were multiple ‘plausible explanations’ for Brown’s injury, and although plaintiffs’ theory was one of them, the evidence was ‘without selective application’ as to any of them, and therefore they ‘remain conjectures only.’” No evidence pointed “to any particular theory of causation, or any evidentiary basis from which from which a jury could determine, beyond conjecture, what had happened. The mere possibility that Brown could have been injured as a result of Comstock’s alleged negligence was insufficient as a matter of law to establish causation.” The court found that even “presuming that Comstock was negligent in crossing over the yellow line, Brown’s acknowledged awareness of Comstock’s truck and trailer and of their passing of the garbage truck—as confirmed by Brown’s and Comstock’s contemporaneous meeting of eyes— demonstrates that Comstock’s crossing of the yellow line itself played no causative role in the event. The jury was not permitted to infer causation merely because it presumed Comstock negligent and Brown not negligent; moreover, the issue should not have reached the jury without plaintiffs presenting more than mere speculation in support of causation.”