Defense Digest, Vol. 29, No. 3, September 2023

To Proximately Cause or Not Proximately Cause?

By
Steven B. Saal

Key Points: 

  • A negligent actor can be held responsible if the supposed intervening cause is “foreseeable.”
  • Foreseeability is generally within the province of the jury.
  • A chain-reaction accident may be a foreseeable result of a vehicle becoming disabled within a lane of a busy interstate highway.

A negligent act does not always automatically make a party liable in tort. For liability to exist, after the duty and breach are established, the prosecuting party must also always prove causation. And if the alleged breach of a duty did not proximately cause the alleged harm, liability will not attach. This idea is axiomatic in all aspects of tort law, including motor vehicle and transportation law. Defendants are often entitled to summary judgment where the evidence establishes that the proximate cause of an accident was something other than the defendant’s actions, or where there is a superseding and intervening cause that produced the harm. 

However, this idea was not followed in a recent Florida appellate decision. In Serrano v. Dickinson, 2023 WL 3985021 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. June 14, 2023), the plaintiff alleged she was injured when a semi-truck operated by the co-defendant, Luis Serrano, rear-ended a semi-truck that was stopped in traffic, causing a load to fall off of Serrano’s flatbed and onto the plaintiff’s vehicle. The specific sequence of events is key to the analysis. Dickinson struck a median, causing her Jeep to become disabled. The plaintiff stopped her vehicle behind Dickinson. The first semi-truck, seeing this occur, slowed and engaged her hazard lights. Serrano then rear-ends the first semi-truck, causing the incident that allegedly injured the plaintiff.

The District Court justified the decision by finding that, under Gibson v. Avis Rent-A-Car Sys, Inc., 386 So.2d 520 (Fla. 1980), this chain-reaction accident was a foreseeable result of Dickinson’s vehicle becoming disabled within a lane of a busy interstate highway. Gibson states that a negligent actor can be held responsible if the supposed intervening cause is “foreseeable.” Under this standard, foreseeability is generally within the province of the jury. Dickinson’s arguments—and the trial court’s decision—relied primarily on Department of Transportation v. Anglin, 502 So. 2d 896 (Fla. 1987), because Serrano’s actions—failing to brake until the last second and rear-ending the stopped semi-truck at a speed in excess of 60 miles per hour—were not a reasonably foreseeable result of Dickinson’s vehicle becoming disabled on the turnpike.

In further underlining their rationale, the District Court cited Cooke v. Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance Co., 14 So. 3d 1192 (Fla. 1st DCA 2009). In Cooke, it was concluded that when an accident had occurred an hour earlier and warning flares were set up, a driver’s failure to see stopped vehicles, warning flares, and avoid an accident did not qualify as an intervening cause. The Cooke court also found that a jury could conclude this was as a “foreseeable” “chain of events” stemming from the original accident. The court’s logic amounted to a finding that a jury is permitted to find that a “typical” traffic accident—however that determination is established—can be a foreseeable result of negligently causing or allowing your vehicle to be disabled on the road or otherwise obstructing traffic in a manner that contributes to a subsequent accident. These standards are ill-defined in the decision. However, the court focuses on “unusual” circumstances, such as in Anglin, where a car became disabled because it drove through a large pool of water and then the accident occurred when a vehicle that turned around to assist the disabled car did so in such a reckless manner as to crash into the disabled vehicle. The court also put great focus on the fact that this obstruction was also on a major interstate highway as opposed to a “rural” road. This leaves open the possibility that if you negligently disable your vehicle on a back road, where vehicles travel at slower speeds, and they should someone crash into your stopped vehicle, this could be a superseding and intervening cause as a matter of law.

The Serrano holding appears to establish that motorists who “see what there is to be seen” and avoid accidents will not be held to be the sole proximate cause in a chain-reaction accident, if the totality of events are considered foreseeable. This begs the question of what someone who is involved in an accident can do if their attempts to alert other motorists, such as by setting up road flares and otherwise making the lane obstruction inarguably conspicuous, do not serve as absolute defenses to the negligence of another party?

*Steven is a shareholder in our Westchester County, New York, office. He can be reached at 914.977.7330 or SBSaal@mdwcg.com.

 

 

Defense Digest, Vol. 29, No. 3, September 2023, is prepared by Marshall Dennehey to provide information on recent legal developments of interest to our readers. This publication is not intended to provide legal advice for a specific situation or to create an attorney-client relationship. ATTORNEY ADVERTISING pursuant to New York RPC 7.1. © 2023 Marshall Dennehey. All Rights Reserved. This article may not be reprinted without the express written permission of our firm. For reprints, contact tamontemuro@mdwcg.com.