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538 A.2d 1015

Munzi v. Kennedy

Supreme Court of Rhode Island

Decided March 22, 1988

Supreme Court of Rhode Island · decided 1988-03-22

Relies on Ward v. Watson

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1988-03-22

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently January 2005

3 state decisions

10198819902000decided

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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¶1OPINION

PER CURIAM.

¶2On March 8, 1988 the plaintiff, through her counsel, appeared before this court to *1016show cause why her appeal from the grant by a Superior Court justice of the defendants’ motion for summary judgment should not be denied. The plaintiff was seeking damages for injuries she received when she fell down a flight of stairs which ran from the first to the second floor in a single-family residence that the defendants had rented to the plaintiffs son. The plaintiff faults the defendants for the absence of a handrail and inadequate lighting.

¶3Recently in Ward v. Watson, 524 A.2d 1108, 1109 (R.I. 1987), we reiterated the “long-settled rule that in Rhode Island a landlord is not liable for injuries sustained by a tenant or guest on the tenant’s premises, unless the injury results from a latent defect known to the landlord but not to the tenant, or from the landlord’s breach of a covenant to repair.” There is no dispute that the landlords never made any agreement relative to repairs, and it is obvious that the lack of a handrail and the alleged lighting conditions were patent, rather than latent, defects.

¶4The plaintiffs’ appeal is denied and dismissed. The judgment appealed from is affirmed.

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