AUSTIN – The Supreme Court of Texas reversed a judgment from a lower appellate court and reinstated one from a Dallas County trial court, which found both parties in a fatal motor vehicle-freight train collision negligently caused the accident.
In a June 28 opinion falling 7-2, state Supreme Court Justices Nathan Hecht, Debra Lehrmann, Jeffrey S. Boyd, John P. Devine, J. Brett Busby, Jane Bland and Rebeca Aizpuru Huddle constituted the majority, while Justices Evan Young and Jimmy Blacklock dissented from that majority.
Boyd delivered the Court’s majority opinion in this case.
“A Kansas City Southern Railway Company train collided with Ladonna Sue Rigsby’s pickup truck, as she drove across a railroad track on a rural county road near her home. The track had been there for over a century, and KC Southern maintained it by lifting and adding materials under the rails and ties, incrementally raising the track over the course of many years. This created a ‘humped crossing,’ with the mid-point rising around 30 inches above the level road 30 feet away. No signal lights, bells or barrier gates protected the crossing, but ‘crossbuck’ signs – white, X-shaped signs reading ‘Railroad Crossing’ – marked the tracks from both directions. The posts holding those signs also previously included yield signs, but – for reasons no one could explain – the yield signs were missing at the time of Rigsby’s accident,” Boyd said.
“According to a video of the accident recorded by a camera installed on the train, Rigsby slowed her vehicle to around seven miles per hour as she approached the track, and then to three or three-and-a-half miles per hour as she began to ascend the hump. Rigsby, who was deaf in her left ear, continued to cross the track as if she never saw or heard the train approaching from her left. She did not survive the collision. Rigsby’s adult children, Angela Horton and Kevin Houser, sued KC Southern, alleging negligence based on the humped crossing and missing yield sign. KC Southern filed a summary judgment motion, asserting, among other things, that federal law pre-empts Horton’s claim. The trial court denied the motion, and KC Southern filed a motion for reconsideration, arguing federal law pre-empts Horton’s claim, at least to the extent it is based on the humped crossing. The trial court did not rule on that motion, and the case proceeded to trial.”
At trial, the Court submitted a single broad-form liability question to the jury, asking whether the negligence of Rigsby or KC Southern proximately caused the accident. KC Southern objected to the question, arguing the Court should submit two separate negligence questions – one based on Horton’s humped-crossing allegation and the other on the missing-yield-sign allegation.
The trial court overruled that objection. The jury found Rigsby and KC Southern both negligently caused the accident and assigned 50 percent of the responsibility to each. The trial court rendered a final judgment based on the verdict, awarding Horton $200,000 in damages.
KC Southern appealed, and the Court of Appeals reversed, with one justice dissenting. The Court concluded the evidence supports negligence liability under the yield-sign allegation but federal law pre-empts the claim to the extent it is based on the humped-crossing allegation. Because the Court could not ‘determine whether the jury rested its liability determination on [Horton’s] pre-empted humped crossing theory, which should not have been submitted, or the missing yield sign theory,’ it remanded the case for a new trial only on the yield-sign allegation. Horton and KC Southern both filed petitions for review to the state Supreme Court.
Upon analysis, while Boyd and his colleagues rejected KC Southern’s argument that the ICCT Act pre-empts liability on Horton’s humped-crossing allegation, they did concur with KC Southern that no evidence supports liability on Horton’s missing-yield-sign allegation.
“We conclude that KC Southern did not meet its burden to establish that Horton’s negligence claim complaining of the humped crossing would pose the ‘unreasonable burden or interference with rail transportation’ required to trigger implied pre-emption under Section 10501(b) [of the ICCT Act],” Boyd said.
“Even assuming we should consider more than the burden of the compensatory damages alone, KC Southern failed to provide definitive evidence of the cost of any of the possible solutions needed to eliminate the hazard at this specific crossing. And even if we assume, as KC Southern argues, that Horton’s claim could require it to lower all the humps on all its crossings, it provided no evidence of those costs and burdens either.”
The most specific evidence KC Southern presented to establish an “unreasonable” burden involved testimony that the curvature of this section of track, which was in a hilly area, would require undercutting a longer section of track than normal and would be further complicated by the presence of a flood-control culvert in the area.
“KC Southern’s witness testified that this would not be ‘a very feasible function for us to perform.’ But even accepting KC Southern’s assertions that lowering the track would exceed the scope of a typical crossing rehabilitation, KC Southern failed to contest Horton’s evidence that lowering the track would close the track for less than a day and would only require weight and speed restrictions for 48 hours. As to the less burdensome option of raising the road, KC Southern provided no evidence of possible delays associated with such a solution, nor did it successfully refute Horton’s evidence that partnering with the local road authority for such a project would be routine,” Boyd continued.
“We thus hold that KC Southern failed to meet its burden to establish that Section 10501(b) impliedly preempts Horton’s humped-crossing negligence claim. And having also concluded that the section does not expressly preempt the claim, we hold that the court of appeals erred by holding that Section 10501(b) preempts Horton’s claim that KC Southern negligently caused the accident by creating the humped crossing.”
In addition to the complaint about the humped crossing, Horton also alleged that KC Southern negligently caused the accident by failing to ensure that yield signs remained in place on the posts containing the crossbuck signs at the crossing, while KC Southern argued that no evidence could support a finding that the lack of a yield sign proximately caused the accident.
The Court’s majority agreed with KC Southern on that point.
“The video recording confirms that Rigsby, who lived near the crossing and regularly crossed it for years up until she was hospitalized several weeks before the accident in fact did slow down as she approached the crossing, and then slowed even more, to three or three-and-a-half miles per hour, before reaching the rails. As Horton’s expert confirmed, Rigsby ‘was cautious. She showed approach. It looked like she was intent. The purpose of those kind of signs and a warning sign is to alert that.’ We must conclude that no evidence supports a finding that, more likely than not, Rigsby would have approached the crossing any more cautiously or intently had the yield sign been present or that the absence of the yield sign more likely than not caused Rigsby to drive into the train’s path,” Boyd said.
As to the point regarding the missing-yield-sign allegation, Boyd and his majority colleagues found that the trial court’s jury charge question on broad-form negligence ultimately did not cause reversible error.
“The charge at issue here did not mention the missing yield sign at all, much less lead the jury to believe that it should or could find liability based on that allegation. Ultimately, the jury (on a 10–2 vote) found KC Southern and Rigsby were both negligent and equally responsible for causing the accident, and the trial court rendered judgment on that verdict awarding Horton $200,000. Based on this record, we cannot say that the judgment is probably improper, and we are instead reasonably certain that the jury was not significantly influenced by the erroneous broad-form submission,” Boyd said.
“In essence, we conclude that this case is [one] in which the jury could, and probably did, ‘simply ignore a factor in the charge that lacks evidentiary support,’ and not…where the jury was ‘as misled by the inclusion of a claim without evidentiary support as by a legally erroneous instruction.’ We thus conclude that the submission of the broad-form negligence question, although erroneous, did not cause the rendition of an improper judgment and thus did not constitute harmful or reversible error.”
Alongside his majority colleagues, Boyd then issued his conclusion.
“We hold that the ICCT Act does not expressly pre-empt Horton’s humped-crossing negligence claim, that KC Southern failed to bear its burden of proving that the Act impliedly pre-empts that claim, and that the evidence is legally insufficient to support liability based on Horton’s missing-yield-sign negligence claim. Because we also conclude the trial court’s erroneous use of a broad-form question to submit Horton’s negligence claim did not constitute harmful error, we reverse the court of appeals’ judgment and reinstate the trial court’s judgment,” Boyd stated.
Supreme Court of Texas case 21-0769
Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of Texas case 05-19-00856-CV
From the Southeast Texas Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com