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190 A.D. 170

Gardner v. Hines

Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York · decided 1919-12-29

Appeal by the defendant, Walker D. Hines, from a judgment of the Supreme Court in favor of the plaintiff, entered in the office of the clerk of the county of Kings on the 8th day of May, 1919, upon the verdict of a jury for $21,500, and also from an order entered in said clerk’s office on the 7th day of May, 1919, denying defendant’s motion for a new trial made upon the minutes.

Decided 1919-12-29

Putnam, J.:

¶1Where a barge with tug is engaged in transporting cargo from New York city to the West Shore piers at Weehawken, N. J., and is actually in course of that voyage, the owner is engaged in interstate commerce. The proof here also brings within the protection of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (35 U. S. Stat. at Large, 65, chap. 149, as amd. by 36 id. 291, chap. 143) the barge captain’s acts when in the course of the voyage he passed to and from the tug alongside, in taking coal for his barge galley. As the statute allows a recovery if the accident was caused in part from negligence of defendant’s employees, the court rightly declined to charge that if the proximate cause of plaintiff’s accident was his fall from the tug’s rail, the verdict should be for defendant. Counsel did not request special findings as *172to what sum they deducted from plaintiff’s recovery, because of any contributory negligence on his part, as this court, following the Federal courts, has suggested should be the proper form of verdict in such cases (McAuliffe v. New York Central & H. R. R. R. Co., 172 App. Div. 597), so that we are deprived of the means to review this verdict in that respect.

¶2In the entire record we find no reversible error. The judgment and order are, therefore, affirmed, with costs.

¶3Present — Rich, Putnam, Blackmar, Kelly and Jaycox, JJ.

¶4Judgment and order unanimously affirmed, with costs.

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