Transportation Article Section 21-801(a) Reasonable and Prudent Speed Required: You are instructed that it is the law this State that a person may not drive a vehicle on a highway at a speed that, with regard to the actual and potential dangers existing, is more than that which is reasonable and prudent under the conditions.
Maryland Accident Attorney Analysis
This instruction is often sought by the defendant in Maryland personal injury/auto accident cases in an effort to prove the contributory negligence of the Plaintiff. Specifically, defense counsel often attempts to argue that this instruction is appropriate because the Plaintiff was driving at a speed such that he would not have been in that place had he been driving at the appropriate speed. But it is important to remember that even if the Plaintiff is driving his vehicle at a speed in excess of that permitted by any statute or ordinance, vehicle speed is not the proximate cause of a collision when the Plaintiff's car was where it was entitled to be and the driver would not have had sufficient time to avoid the collision had he been driving at a lawful speed.
A good example of this principle is found in Myers v. Bright, 327 Md. 395 (1992). In this case, Plaintiff was the injured driver in an auto accident. The Plaintiff was driving in the right-hand southbound lane, which was for through traffic, on U.S. Route 11 in Hagerstown. The lane to her left was for vehicles turning left at an intersection further down the road. On her right was a Burger King restaurant that had an entrance onto the highway. The cars to her left stopped waiting to turn left at the intersection approximately 50 feet past the Burger King.
The Defendant who was driving northbound on Route 11, seeking to turn left into the Burger King. This maneuver required Defendant to cut through the line of vehicles in the left turn lane and then cross the southbound lane of traffic. Among the southbound vehicles waiting to turn left was a pickup truck just north of the Burger King entrance. The driver of the pickup truck motioned to Bright to go ahead and turn in front of him. The Defendant tried to turn left across both southbound lanes and into the Burger King's parking lot. In doing so, Defendant hit Plaintiff's car. Plaintiff testified at trial that that she saw Defendant’s vehicle emerging from in front of the pickup a split second before the crash. Plaintiff said that there was no way for her to avoid the accident.
Plaintiff filed a personal injury suit against defendant driver. Judge Wright of Washington County entered judgment for the plaintiff (Plaintiff prevailed as a matter of law) and the jury awarded her $30,000. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals, however, reversed Judge Wright's ruling. But the Maryland Court of Appeals disagreed and essentially reinstated Judge Wright's ruling that Defendant was negligent as a matter of law and Plaintiff was not contributorily negligent.
The opinion in Myers was written by Judge Howard Chasanow (Judge Chasanow has since retired from the Maryland Court of Appeals and is now a mediator/arbitrator held in extremely high regard by attorneys for both plaintiffs and defendants). The opinion clearly articulates why speed rarely leads to a finding of contributory negligence. The court found that that the defendant, having failed to yield the right of way to plaintiff while making a left turn, was negligent as a matter of law and that Plaintiff's speed had not impeded her ability to avoid the auto accident. Finally, the court held that because there was no evidence that plaintiff's speed was a proximate cause of the car crash, she was not contributorily negligent for the accident.
Judge Chasanow's opinion noted that the court does not condone speeding and recognizes that there are criminal penalties for violating Section 21-311 but that does not make the conduct a contributing cause of an accident.
The take home message for Maryland personal injury attorneys is that you must vigorously fight efforts by defense counsel who seek to confuse the court into giving this section of the Transportation Code as a contributory negligence instruction without a proper foundation that the plaintiff's speed was a proximate cause of the auto accident. Typically, the defendant's argument that speed was a factor is purely speculation. The Myers court, however, ruled mere conjecture that the accident might have been caused by the alleged speeding is insufficient to send the case to the jury. Id. at 405. See also Dow v. L & R Props., 144 Md. App. 67, 75 (2002) (lead paint causation opinion written by retired judge Marvin Smith affirming this principle even though court found enough evidence in that case to send the causation issue to the jury); Lyon v. Campbell, 120 Md. App. 412 (1997). Accordingly, if your client's testimony is that it was "just a couple of seconds" between the time he discovered the car in his lane of traffic and the collision, you should be able to effectively argue to the court that there still is no credible evidence to support the conclusion that the accident could have been avoided by your client.
