McCann v. Crum

Hammond, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. The claim of McCann, the plaintiff below, that the injuries for which he sought damages were caused by the negligence of Crum and Lambert, the defendants, in the operation of a truck, was rejected by the jury. McCann has appealed, saying that the trial court erred in refusing to instruct the jury (a) that the defendants were negligent and he was free of negligence, and (b) that he was a-favored driver to whose prejudice Crum and ⁶⁷ Lambert had violated the boulevard law in varying aspects and facets, set out in many prayers offered and refused. The accident occurred on Route 340, a public highway, paved for a width of twenty-four feet with an unpaved shoulder on each side seven feet wide, running between Frederick and Harper’s Ferry.

Lambert, a part time rural mail carrier, mired his automobile in the ditch on the side of the southbound lane. Crum was driving his 1957 truck north, taking calves to a livestock auction. Lambert flagged down Crum who assumed the role of a good Samaritan (Luke, Ch. 10). A chain was broken in an attempt to pull Lambert’s car onto the road.

Crum, with Lambert aboard, then drove three hundred feet south and off the south side of the road into the place of a man named Rose who had a logging chain. They put the chain in the truck, backed out onto Route 340, and continued to back north in the southbound lane. Crum was driving, and Lambert was standing in the cab, on the offside, with his head and shoulders outside, looking back over the top of the truck, holding on with his right hand and signalling on-coming southbound traffic with his left hand. There are two versions of how the accident happened.

Mc-Cann says he was driving south at forty miles an hour, going to the Charlestown race track, where he worked, when he saw the Lambert car in the ditch on the right and the truck two hundred to two hundred twenty-five feet ahead, partly on the road and partly on the shoulder. When he was fifty to seventy feet from the truck, he says, it backed right into his path. Vehicles in the northbound lane kept him from swerving to his left, and although he applied his brakes, he could not avoid the impact. Crum and Lambert say the truck, on the way back to Lambert’s car, had been backed in the southbound lane a considerable distance from the Rose entrance onto Route 340 with Lambert waving to southbound traffic to slow up.

He waved two cars around, and they passed in the northbound lane. The truck had stopped, on Lambert’s instruction to Crum, to let them do this. Crum then asked Lambert if the road was clear so he could start to back up, and before he could answer, the collision occurred. Lambert says McCann pulled to the left as if to ⁶⁸ go by in the northbound lane but then pulled back and ran into the rear of the truck.

Both Crum and Lambert say the truck had been standing in the south lane some thirty seconds before it was struck. We find no mistake in the action of the trial court in sending the case to the jury. Backing on the highway is not forbidden by law, nor is it negligence