Vasquez

Plaintiff appeals from an adverse judgment entered pursuant to a jury's verdict in his action to recover for personal injuries suffered in a highway accident. We have concluded that plaintiff's claims of error in the jury instructions are immaterial and need not be discussed because the uncontradicted evidence overwhelmingly supports the jury's implied determination that plaintiff's own conduct at the least constituted negligence which proximately contributed to his injuries. Hence, no miscarriage of justice is shown and the judgment should be affirmed.

At about 1 o'clock on a March morning in 1954 plaintiff met one Vargas in a parking lot near the city of Santa Clara. On the parking lot was a Plymouth automobile owned by Vargas. The automobile was not in operable condition; its engine could not be started. Rain was falling at the time. Plaintiff, Vargas, and a third man joined in pushing the nonoperable automobile from its position of safety on the private property onto the highway, which at that point had three lanes, plus hard shoulders, and flat areas of dirt or gravel beyond the shoulders. The highway was straight for at least a half mile in each direction, and…

I dissent on the ground that numerous seriously erroneous instructions operated to deny plaintiff a fair trial in a fact-context so complicated that the jury could have as plausibly found for plaintiff as against him. The pile-up of erroneous instructions matched the pile-up on the highway, and their total effect was bound to be prejudicial when the facts themselves invited so many possibilities of conjecture as to negligence and causation.

Even in fact situations less obscure than this one the court need not find that it was more probable than not that errors influenced the jury to deem them prejudicial. It must deem them prejudicial if it finds it not improbable that had they been absent another result would have been reached. Otherwise it would be declaring errors harmless in the face of a substantial chance that they were not, thereby depriving the appellant of the trial to which he was entitled. “[T]he fact that there exists at least such an equal balance of reasonable probabilities [as to leave the court in serious doubt as to whether error influenced the jury] necessarily means that the court is of the opinion ‘that it is reasonably probable that a result more favorable to…

Plaintiff appeals from an adverse judgment entered pursuant to a jury’s verdict in his action to recover for personal injuries suffered in a highway accident. We have concluded that plaintiff’s claims of error in the jury instructions are immaterial and need not be discussed because the uncontradicted evidence overwhelmingly supports the jury’s implied determination that plaintiff’s own conduct at the least constituted negligence which proximately contributed to his injuries. Hence, no miscarriage of justice is shown and the judgment should be affirmed.

At about 1 o ’clock on a March morning in 1954 plaintiff met one Vargas in a parking lot near the city of Santa Clara. On the parking lot was a Plymouth automobile owned by Vargas. The automobile was not in operable condition; its engine could not be started. Rain was falling at the time. Plaintiff, Vargas, and a third man joined in pushing the nonoperable automobile from its position of safety on the private property onto the highway, which at that point had three lanes, plus hard shoulders, and flat areas of dirt or gravel beyond the shoulders. The highway was straight for at least a half mile in each direction, and the posted…