Caseflicks

Mississippi Supreme Court • 1939

Kramer Service, Inc. v. Wilkins

186 So. 625 | 184 Miss. 483 | 1939 Miss. LEXIS 63

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Takeaway

In short, the hotel remained liable for the falling glass, but a later cancer could not be included in damages on proof of possible causation alone.

Background

A hotel guest invited Wilkins, a business associate, to his room under the hotel’s longstanding practice of allowing guests to receive business visitors. The guest had noticed broken glass in the transom above the door and reported it to the hotel clerk. When Wilkins later opened the door in an ordinary manner, the glass fell and injured his head.

A wound on Wilkins’s temple did not heal, and skin cancer was diagnosed there about two years later. Wilkins claimed the injury caused the cancer. The trial court refused the hotel’s requested instruction that the jury could not award damages for the cancer, and the jury awarded Wilkins $20,000. The hotel appealed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the evidence supported holding the hotel liable for the injury caused by the falling transom glass.

Holding

Yes. The Court affirmed the judgment on liability.

Reasoning

Wilkins was visiting a guest for a business conference, consistent with the hotel’s longstanding practice of allowing such visits.

Evidence showed that the glass had been broken long enough to charge the hotel with notice. A reasonably careful hotel operator could have foreseen that it might fall and cause injury. It fell when Wilkins opened the door normally, and the Court found no reversible error on liability.

Issue #2

Whether testimony that the head injury could possibly have caused Wilkins’s later skin cancer permitted the jury to award damages for the cancer.

Holding

No. The Court reversed and remanded for a new determination of damages.

Reasoning

Causation requires more than a possible connection or the fact that one event followed another. Evidence that an injury might have caused a later condition cannot, by itself, sustain an award for that condition.

One skin specialist testified that such an injury could cause cancer but estimated the chance at only one in a hundred; the other denied any causal connection. Neither supplied evidence that the injury probably caused Wilkins’s cancer.

Expert opinions are ordinarily advisory. But the cause of cancer was beyond lay knowledge, and the specialists’ testimony was undisputed on the decisive point: it did not support a probable connection. The jury could not substitute the timing of the diagnosis for evidence of causation.

The trial court therefore should have instructed the jury not to consider the cancer or its prolongation of Wilkins’s condition. Because the $20,000 verdict evidently included substantial damages for cancer, the damages award could not stand.