Allen v. State Ex Rel. Taetle

Bond, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The appeal is from a judgment for damages from the death of the husband and father of the equitable plaintiffs in a collision of motor vehicles at a street crossing in Baltimore City. Code, art. 67, sec. 1 et seq.,, as amended by Laws 1929, ch. 570, sec. 3. And the questions pressed are whether the evidence offered was legally sufficient to support a finding of negligence on the defendants’ part causing the accident, and whether the credibility of one of the defendants could be impeached on cross-examination by showing his refusal to testify at a coroner’s inquest.

The question of negligence turned on the condition of signal lights at the time, and the right of way given by them. The deceased kept a shop at the northwest corner of Belair Road and Parkside Drive, and was starting eastwardly to make some deliveries of goods sold, and, in crossing Belair Road, which runs in a general northerly direction, he collided with a truck coming south on that road, driven by the defendant Allen and owned by Curtis. There were traffic signal lights hanging over ⁶⁵¹ the intersection from the southwest- and northeast corners, and these always showed green lights, and gave the right of way to traffic on Belair Road, except when a vehicle approaching on the cross road changed the signal by tripping a treadle in the roadway. A green-light signal - was then given to the cross road traffic after the Belair Road traffic had had a green light for a minimum of forty seconds, the change, however, requiring four seconds in any event.

The Belair Road traffic then, of course, received a red light signal, stopping it. The official of the police department in charge of the signals, and the officers stationed in the neighborhood, testified that, on a change, a red light on the cross street, or on the Belair Road, would yield directly to green, but that, changing from the green, first there was an amber showing with the green for four seconds, and then both yielded to red. Seven witnesses gave evidence for the defendant tending to prove that a green light was showing for traffic on the Belair Road as the two vehicles approached the crossing, some of them adding that the green had succeeded a red light only a short time before, when the truck was still part of a block away. And against this there was testimony for the plaintiffs that a young man waiting to cross the Belair Road on foot saw an amber light, which, according to the officers would show with the green and be followed by red, and that the wife of the deceased, watching from the side of the house, saw on the Parkside Drive signals, those toward her husband, first an amber light, then a green, which according to the officers was an impossible sequence.

Whatever the comparative weight of the testimony of the young man and the wife, there was in it some evidence of a right of way given to the deceased, and violation of the right by the driver of the truck, and this was sufficient in law to support a finding of negligence in the latter causing the accident. Prayers of the defendants for direction of a verdict in their favor because of lack of such evidence were, therefore, properly refused. ⁶⁵² The controversy