Michigan Court of Appeals; Docket # 345788; Unpublished
Judges Kelly, Borrello, and Servitto; per curiam
Official Michigan Reporter Citation: Not Applicable; Link to Opinion
STATUTORY INDEXING:
Applicability of Comparative Fault to Noneconomic Loss Claims [§3135(2)]
TOPICAL INDEXING:
Not Applicable
SUMMARY:
In this unanimous unpublished per curiam decision, the Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s summary disposition order dismissing the plaintiff’s third-party automobile negligence action. The Court of Appeals determined that the trial court erred in determining, as a matter of law, that the plaintiff, Latricia Howard, was more than 50% at fault for the underlying motor vehicle collision, and therefore barred from bringing this action under MCL 500.3135(2)(b). Howard failed to yield at an intersection and was struck by the defendant, Lacey Renee Wistinghausen, an intoxicated minor. The Court of Appeals determined that Wistinghausen’s statutory violation—driving under the influence—“permits the inference that she was generally negligent,” and that an exact allocation of each party’s percentage of fault should have been left for a jury to determine.
On June 20, 2015, Howard approached an intersection and stopped at a blinking red light. After looking both ways and seeing no oncoming traffic, she initiated a left turn into the intersection, at which point the defendant, Lacey Renee Wistinghausen, an intoxicated minor, collided with the side of Howard’s vehicle. Wistinghausen was arrested at the scene, and Howard was assessed a failure-to-yield citation. In a subsequent third-party action filed by Howard against Wistinghausen, the trial court granted summary disposition in Wistinghausen’s favor, finding that there was no question of fact as to whether Howard was more than 50% at-fault for the collision.
The Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s summary disposition order in Wistinghausen’s favor, finding that although Howard was at least partly negligent in causing the collision, a jury could infer that Wistinghausen was also negligent based on the fact that she was intoxicated at the time of the collision. Wistinghausen argued that the mere, uncontroverted fact that Howard failed to yield proves, as a matter of law, that Howard was more than 50% responsible for the collision. The Court of Appeals disagreed:
In this case, we emphasize that although there is undisputed evidence that traffic in the direction in which defendant was traveling had the right of way, there is also undisputed evidence that defendant was not lawfully driving on the road but was instead driving while intoxicated while also being under the age of 21, in violation of MCL 257.625(6). This fact sufficiently distinguishes the factual circumstances of this case from those of McGuire and Churukian with respect to the starting point of our analysis. In this case, we are presented with a situation where neither driver was driving lawfully as they entered the intersection. We have already discussed plaintiff’s role with respect to causation. As to defendant, she had a duty to make continuing observations of the surrounding traffic conditions, despite her right of way, and to attempt to avoid an impending collision once a reasonably prudent person would have realized that a subordinate driver was challenging defendant’s right of way. McGuire, 354 Mich at 236. The trial court erred when it failed to engage in such an analysis, concluding instead that as a matter of law that defendant was not negligent in any way that contributed to the accident.
The Court next considered whether “a genuine issue of material fact exists regarding any negligence on defendant’s part that could be found to be the proximate cause of plaintiff’s injury.” In that regard, the Court concluded:
Accordingly, viewing the evidence in a light most favorable to plaintiff as the nonmoving party, and drawing all reasonable inferences in plaintiff’s favor, we conclude that a jury could find from the record evidence that defendant’s unlawful conduct was a proximate cause of plaintiff’s injury, such that the parties’ respective degrees of comparative fault must be compared.
