Georgia Court of Appeals Reverses Trial Court in Truck Accident
A truck driver appealed from the trial court’s order granting summary judgment on his negligence claim against a terminal tractor manufacturer, asserting that the trial court erred in granting the defendant’s motion because the evidence presented a fact issue as to whether the defendant’s negligence proximately caused their injuries.
Background
In May 2019, a truck driver was acting in the course and scope of his employment while driving a truck that was owned and maintained by the defendant. Prior to driving the truck, the driver performed a pre-trip inspection and “didn’t see any visible issue with the truck.” The trailer was already connected.
During his drive, the driver tried to make a U-turn, but the truck jack-knifed into the trailer he was pulling. The driver described the incident: in the process of turning, something happened that caused him to feel off balance. … instead of staying in a round curve, the truck kind of did a dip, and it seemed like the trailer was pushing the truck. When he realized the truck was out of control, he tried to take his foot off the accelerator, but the positioning or something— his balance or whatever—wouldn’t allow him to take his foot off the accelerator.
In addition, the truck driver testified:
Whatever went wrong caused me not to be able — it either shifted my weight or whatever. But realizing the truck was out of control, my foot was wedged on the accelerator, and I couldn’t move it to the brake. There was nothing I could do to take his foot off the accelerator because of my position. I was off balance because of the way that the truck turned and my body weight was pushing down like I was standing on one foot. I had no idea what caused me to lose control of the truck, but I think my inability to remove my foot from the accelerator might have been the cab coming up or whatever.
The truck driver’s truck collided with another truck, and the truck driver was ejected through the driver’s side window of his truck. He suffered injuries to his shoulder, neck, back, head, and knee, and he was out of work for 16 months.
Expert Testimony at Trial
At trial, the plaintiffs’ expert testified that the defendant’s employees failed to latch the cab of the truck closed, and the cab of the truck rose prior to impact. This caused the trailer to become lodged under the cab. In the expert’s opinion, while the truck driver’s turning maneuver caused the truck cab to make contact with the trailer and jack knife, the raised cab contributed to cause the jack knife.
In addition, the expert said that the truck driver may have been able to avoid the accident altogether if the issue with the cab latch didn’t exist.
The truck driver filed a negligence suit against the defendant, asserting claims for damages. The complaint was amended to include the truck driver’s wife as a plaintiff and assert a claim for her loss of consortium. The defendant subsequently moved for summary judgment and, after a hearing, the trial court granted the defendant’s motion, finding that there was “no question of material fact in the record regarding causation. The truck driver’s driving while attempting a U-turn was the sole proximate cause of the vehicle initially going out of control, the trial court said.
According to the trial court, “there is no evidence to establish that but for the defendant’s negligence, the plaintiff wouldn’t have been injured or that he would not have been as badly injured. Since he must introduce some evidence in this regard in order to prevail on his claims and survive summary judgment on these issues, his claims now fail.”
On appeal, the plaintiffs contended that the trial court erred in entering summary judgment to the defendant on the truck driver’s negligence claim and on the truck driver’s wife’s derivative claim for loss of consortium.
The Court of Appeals Reverses
Judge Ken Hodges wrote that Georgia law strongly disfavors removing the issue of negligence from a jury:
Negligence is not susceptible to summary adjudication except where the evidence is plain, palpable, and indisputable that the respondent cannot present any slight evidence on each essential element of the action in rebuttal to create a jury issue. Questions of negligence, diligence, contributory negligence and proximate cause are peculiarly matters for the jury, and a court should not take the place of the jury in solving them, except in plain and indisputable cases.
Judge Hodges found that the facts here were not so “clear, plain, palpable and undisputed” so as to warrant summary judgment in favor of the defendant as to liability.
First, there was some evidence that the defendant’s employees failed to properly latch the truck’s cab closed after they inspected and serviced the truck and that this failure caused the cab to raise. Moreover, the truck driver and other witnesses testified that the cab rose up while the truck was being operated prior to the collision. According to the police report following the incident, the truck driver told police that he was making a U-turn with the truck “when the cab came up” and he collided into another truck. The other truck driver involved in the incident told police that he was traveling down the road when he saw the truck driver’s truck “with its cab raised turning towards him.”
Second, although the trial court concluded that the plaintiff’s driving while attempting a U-turn was the sole proximate cause of the vehicle initially going out of control, and there was no evidence to establish that but for the defendant’s negligence, the plaintiff wouldn’t have been injured or that he would not have been as badly injured, these conclusions couldn’t be reconciled with the evidence when it was viewed in a light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the judge concluded.
Specifically, there was some evidence in the record that the raised cab — resulting from the failure to properly latch it closed — caused or contributed to cause the collision. The plaintiffs’ expert opined that the truck driver may have been able to avoid the accident altogether if the issue with the cab latch didn’t exist. The expert specifically testified that he could say with a “reasonable degree of engineering certainty” that because of the latch issue “the cab navigated further over the trailer than it should have and … created the connection;” if the cab had been latched, there likely would have only been “a bump to the back of the cab rather than going under it.”
According to the expert, in his engineering opinion, the raised cab contributed to cause to cause the truck to jack knife because once the connection was made between the truck and the front of the cab, that action “disallowed” the truck driver from mitigating or taking any countermeasures to correct the jack knife. The expert testified that the cab raising and wedging on top of the trailer made the turning radius tighter, which caused more force, and “then there really is no ability to steer out of it if it’s got a connection at the cab.”
Indeed, the truck driver testified that there was nothing he could do to take his foot off the accelerator because of his positioning; he was off balance, his body weight was pushing down, and his foot was wedged on the accelerator.
Moreover, the record included additional evidence that the raised cab caused or contributed to cause the collision. According to the police report attached to the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, a driver who witnessed the incident reported that he saw the truck driver’s truck turning around “and the cab of the jockey truck rose up causing him to lose control and hit” another truck. The police report also noted that another witness stated that he likewise saw the truck driver’s truck make a U-turn “and the cab of the jockey truck rose up and the driver lost control of the jockey truck.” And the truck driver himself testified that “whatever went wrong caused me not to be able [to stop the truck] — it either shifted my weight or whatever. But … my foot was wedged on the accelerator.”
The evidence showed that the unexpected event of the cab rising up because it was improperly latched and the resulting force of that event — rather than solely the truck driver’s attempt to make a simple U-turn — caused him to lose control of the truck or, at the very least, made him unable to take countermeasures to correct any jack knife, leading to the collision and his injuries.
Because Georgia follows the comparative law doctrine and the record contained some evidence that the defendant may have been at least partially at fault for the incident, summary judgment wasn’t appropriate. Judge Hodges wrote:
We must remember that it is the jury, not the court, which is the fact-finding body. It weighs the contradictory evidence and inferences, judges the credibility of witnesses, receives expert instructions, and draws the ultimate conclusion as to the facts. The very essence of its function is to select from among conflicting inferences and conclusions that which it considers most reasonable.
The judge further explained that the sole function of the court on a motion for summary judgment is to determine whether a genuine issue of material fact exists. And even slight evidence giving rise to a triable issue of material fact will be enough to defeat summary judgment. Here, it was clear that such evidence existed.
Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the Court of Appeals concluded that the trial court erred by granting summary judgment to the defendant rather than allowing the case to proceed to trial because material questions of fact exist in the record. Albright v. Terminal Investment Corporation, 2024 Ga. App. LEXIS 483, 2024 WL 4879103 (Ga. App. November 25, 2024).
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