Dwyer v. Chew

Urner, J., delivered: the opinion of the Court. While the plaintiff was driving her automobile on the York Road in Baltimore County it collided with a car driven by the defendant, and for the injuries to her car resulting from the collision, the plaintiff sued the defendant and recovered the judgment which is the occasion of this appeal. The only bill of exception in the record relates to the ruling of the trial court on the defendant’s prayers. ²⁸³ The accident occurred on the afternoon of September 19th, 1923, as the plaintiff, with three other persons, was returning in her Buick sedan automobile from York, Pennsylvania, to her home in Towson, Maryland. According to the plaintiff’s testimony, she was driving slowly down a hill, at the foot of which the road curved to the left, and in going around the curve, close to the edge of the macadam on the right-hand side of the road, which was damp from rain, her car slipped off the macadam “into the dirt,” that she then increased the speed to get hack on the macadam, and this carried the car to the left-hand side of the road, that “when she gpt across and turned to right her ear she looked up and saw another automobile (the defendant’s) coming over the hill, about three or four hundred feet away,” that after she saw the defendant’s car, she was “trying to get over on the right-hand side of the road,” and “was well over the white mark,” which indicated the center, when the defendant’s car, tnough having room to pass on her left, attempted to cross in front of her automobile and thus caused the accident.

The defendant testified, in effect, that he was driving a Studebaker touring car and as he approached the place of the accident from the south, he was on his right-hand side of the road, and the speed of the car was between fifteen -and twenty miles an hour, that he saw the plaintiff’s car coining down the hill, but it became hidden from his view when it ‘“went off” the road at the curve, that when it came into view again it “made a sharp turn, swinging off the road on the other side, and almost hit the fence,” that the plaintiff then “made a curve, with one-half of her car off the macadam and she swung clear across,” “striking his right hind wheel and mud guard,” while his oar was on the east side of the road and after he had brought it to a full stop. It thus appears that, as to the proximate cause of the accident, the descriptions given by the plaintiff and defendant are wholly irreconcilable. But each of the conflicting versions has support in the testimony of other witnesses. It was clearly a jury function to determine as to the facts which were involved in such a contradiction. ²⁸⁴ Contributory negligence as a matter of law is not imputable to tbe plaintiff, as argued for tbe defendant, because of ber unskilful management of ber automobile, in allowing it to slip off tbe macadam at tbe curve and to cross tbe road to the opposite sido while she was trying to regain a proper course of movement on the road, and in turning the car from the left to the right side of the road when the defendant’s ear was approaching, in view of the plaintiff’s testimony that the defendant wa's then several hundred feet distant, and that her car had returned to the right-hand side of the road before the impact;.

If her automobile was actually on that part of the road when the accident happened, and if, as she and some of her witnesses testified, the cars collided because the defendant turned his