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232 Mass. 460

Meech v. Sewall

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1919-03-13

<p>Negligence, In operating motor vehicle. Proximate Cause.</p> <p>Where one driving a motor car in violation of the law of the road and without sounding his horn strikes another motor car with such force as to cause it to knock down and injure a pedestrian on the sidewalk of the highway in the exercise of due care, such unlawful and negligent driver is liable to the person injured, even if negligence on the part of the driver of the other car contributed to the accident, which here was not the case.</p>

Relies on Leahy v. Standard Oil Co.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1919-03-13

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently September 1947

4 state decisions

201919192019301940decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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By the Court.

¶1There was evidence tending to show that the defendant, driving his motor car at great speed, in violation of the law of the road and without sounding his horn, struck another motor car with such force as to cause the latter to strike and injure the plaintiff, a pedestrian in the exercise of due care. The weight of the evidence was wholly for the jury. The testimony of the driver of the other car that he momentarily accelerated its speed to twenty-two miles an hour in a vain effort to escape collision with the defendant, did not require the direction of a verdict in favor of the defendant. The jury found that the driver of the other car was not negligent. Even if the negligence of the driver of the other car contributed to the injury of the plaintiff, that would not exonerate the defendant from the direct result of his own negligence operating in concurrence with that of the other driver. Leahy v. Standard Oil Co. of New York, 224 Mass. 352, 361. The judge refused rightly to direct a verdict for the defendant and accordingly, by the terms of the report, judgment is to be now entered for the plaintiff in the amount of the verdict with interest from April 22, 1918, and costs.

¶2 So ordered.

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