Illinois Central Railroad v. Slater

Citations

• 139 Ill. 190
• 28 N.E. 830

Syllabus

<p>1. Negligence—is a question of fact for the jury. In an action for negligently causing the death of the plaintiff’s intestate by a train of a railway company, the question of negligence is one of fact, for the jury to find from the evidence, and the court has no right to instruct the jury that one thing is negligence and another is not. The jury should ■be left free and untrammeled to determine, from all the evidence, who has been negligent and who has not.</p> <p>2. Hence it is improper for the court, by an instruction, to inform the jury that it is not a want of ordinary care for a train of cars to approach a highway crossing at its usual speed, although there is a team approaching. And so an instruction that the engineer had a right to presume that a team approaching the crossing would stop, is properly refused.</p> <p>3. Same,—failure of railway company to ring bell—competent proof. On a charge of negligence in a railway company in failing to ring a bell on approaching a highway crossing, there is no error in permitting witnesses to testify that they would have heard the bell if it had been rung, following Chicago and Alton Railroad Co. v. Dillon, 123 111. 570.</p> <p>4. Instruction—misleading — assuming question of fact. On the trial of an action brought by an administrator against a railway company to recover damages for the wrongful killing of the intestate at a highway crossing, the defendant asked the court to instruct the jury, that if they believed, from the evidence, that the person in charge of the team stopped forty or fifty feet from the railroad track, and the horses afterward became unmanageable and ran upon the track, defendant was not responsible for the action of the horses, or for any damage to them, which was refused: Held, properly refused, for the reason that the damages to the horses were not involved, and because calculated to mislead the jury as to whether defendant was responsible for what the horses did. That was a question of fact, t