SUPREME COURT Jury Awards Motorist £5427

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31076, 3 June 1966, Page 10

SUPREME COURT Jury Awards Motorist £5427

Damages of £5427 10s lid were awarded to William Henry Donald Barnett, a schoolteacher, last evening in his Supreme Court suit after a fatal motor-accident on the Main South road near Dunsandel in May, 1963.

The jury assessed damages at £12,061 4s 4d—£lo,ooo general damages (the full amount claimed) and £2061 4s 4d special damages—but reduced them by 55 per cent because it held that negligence by Barnett contributed to the accident.

The jury, after deliberating for five hours and threequarters, reached its assessment of contributory negligence by a majority of nine to three.

Mr Justice Macarthur, who presided at the four-day trial, entered judgment for £5427 10s lid, but granted the defence an extension of time to 28 days to move for the setting aside of judgment or a new trial.

Barnett sought £13,790 damages for the injuries he suffered, claiming against the representative of the estate of Trevor George Roberts, a student, of Whangarei, a motor-cyclist killed in the collision.

Barnett, who had the lower right leg amputated, claimed that Roberts caused the accident by riding at excessive speed in the middle of the road.

Barnett was held negligent to overtaking a preceding car when the way was not dear. Both Mr B. McClelland, for Barnett, and Mr G. S. Brockett, for the defendant, addressed the jury at length yesterday. Defence Address The defence case, said Mr Brockett, was that Barnett had pulled out on to his incorrect side of the road to pass Mrs Edwards’s car without noticing the motor-cyclist, and so collided with him. “We say the responsibility for this accident rests solely with Mr Barnett, and that his driving fell short of the standard required,” Mr Brockett said. The sealed roadway where the accident occurred was not very wide, being 10ft 6in on either side of the white line. Barnett, on his own evidence.

was driving at 50 miles an hour—“and it’s unlikely that you’d drive within a few inches of the car you were passing at that speed,” said Mr Brockett.

This, he said, indicated that Barnett was on the wrong side of the road. On the balance of probabilities, the tyre mark lin to l}in on his own side of the middle line was made by his left front tyre, thus placing him well on his wrong side. Roberts, the motor-cyclist, was surely entitled to ride in the biddle of his side of the road. Any prudent motor-cyclist did not ride along the shingle verge. As to Roberts’s speed, said Mr Brockett, there was nothing conclusive in the late Constable W. G. Irving’s report (which described Roberts as riding through Burnham at 70 miles an hour), and the evidence of the witness Dow (who described Roberts as riding just past Dunsandel at 60 miles an hour) could be dismissed as prejudiced against motorcyclists. Address For Plaintiff

Mr McClelland, opening his address, conceded—“and I’d be silly if I didn’t,” he said—that Barnett’s car had been in the act of passing Mrs Edwards’s car when the accident occurred.

But Barnett’s car had been so close to her that he bumped it. Mrs Edwards had been driving hard on the left of her side of the road. Her car was 4ft 9in wide, and Barnett’s sft Bin wide—a total

width of 10ft sin on their side of a 10ft 6in roadway. That, said Mr McClelland, indicated that the tyre mark could not possibly have been made by Barnett's left front wheel. “It must have been the right front wheel which made that mark,” he said. If it had been made by the left-hand front tyre, that placed Barnett sft 6in on his wrong side of the road—“but if so. how on earth did he hit Mrs Edwards's car? And how on earth did the motorcyclist’s blood and brains get on her windscreen?" asked Mr McClelland. It was clear the accident must have happened close to her car, and that Roberts had not been riding where Mrs Edwards said he was. Motor-cyclist’s Speed Mr McClelland submitted that Constable Irving’s report was an indication of how Roberts rode his motor-cycle. “If he rode at 70 miles an hour through Burnham, past the police station, it is significant that he had an accident 11 miles further on,” Mr McClelland said. As to Dow seeing the motor-cyclist riding at 60 miles an hour in the middle of the road, and calling him “a silly young fool.” might not the jury think, in view of what happened, that Dow was right? Was it any wonder that Barnett had misjudged the approaching motor-cyclist’s speed? And was it not clear that Barnett had kept close to Mrs Edwards’s car to avoid the motor-cyclist, riding on the centre-line and not changing that course?