Dorety v. Horrocks

Citations

• 65 Pa. Super. 572
• 1917 Pa. Super. LEXIS 45

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Master and servant — Safe place to worh — Concurrent negligence of fellow servant.</p> <p>Where a workman, whose work requires him to pass along a passageway seven feet wide and one hundred and fifty feet long, sees a barrel rolling rapidly down grade towards him from a side passageway, and in order to avoid the barrel he jumps to one side and falls into a hole where a plank had been removed from the passageway, without his knowledge, he may recover damages from his employer for the injury which he sustained. He is entitled to have a reasonably safe place in which to perform his work.</p> <p>In such a ease the defendant cannot claim exemption from liability on the ground that the barrel had been negligently started down the side passageway by a fellow servant of the plaintiff.</p> <p>An innocent third person cannot be deprived of his remedy because an injury resulted from the concurrent negligence of another person.</p> <p>Negligence — jSgmages—Earnings.</p> <p>In a negligence case it is not reversible error for the court to charge that the plaintiff might recover “any amount of earnings that he had lost by reason of his failure to work on account of the accident,” if it appears that there was no reference to future earnings at the trial, and the size of the verdict does not indicate that the jury included any. The language of the charge might have been more explicit, and the defendant should have requested fuller instructions at the trial if he so desired.</p> <p>In such a case it is not reversible error for the court to charge that it is for the jury to determine as to what is a reasonable sum to be paid the plaintiff “for the pain and suffering, remembering that it must be compensation and not speculation or anything of that kind, and that the rule of law, as given to us by the Supreme Court, is that such sum must be a reasonable sum.”</p>