Belk v. People

Citations

• 125 Ill. 584
• 17 N.E. 744
• 1888 Ill. LEXIS 1137

Syllabus

<p>1. Criminal law—reckless or negligent driving on the highway—liability criminally for results. Every person driving upon the public highway is under a legal duty to observe, in the control and management of his team, the exercise of reasonable care to prevent injury to others, and he is criminally responsible for the neglect or willful failure to perform that duty. To create this responsibility, however, the law must cast upon the persons sought to be charged, the legal obligation to do the act or perform the service the omission of which is alleged to be the direct cause of the injury.</p> <p>2. If persons having the control and management of horses attached to-a vehicle, in which they are riding along a highway behind another conveyance, knowing the danger of a collision with the forward conveyance and the probable consequences flowing therefrom, recklessly and negligently, or wantonly and willfully, allow their horses to run down and collide with the other vehicle, without using such means as are reasonably at their command to prevent the same, they will be held criminally responsible for the result of their negligence or willful omission of duty. If it is the cause of death they may be convicted of manslaughter.</p> <p>3. Same—injury resulting from inevitable accident. But if they are not guilty of negligence, and the collision is the result of inevitable accident, or resulted from their horses becoming unmanageable without their fault, and uncontrollable by the exercise of proper care, there can be no criminal liability.</p> <p>4. Same—-whether negligence the proximate cause of injury. If a party in a wagon, on a highway, through negligence and carelessness, or willfully and wantonly, allows his team to become unmanageable, whereby it collides with another wagon, and causes the team of the latter wagon to run away and throw a person therefrom, inflicting injuries from which he dies, there being no interposition of any human will acting independently of the f