Jones v. United States

194 F. Supp. 3d 849, 2016 WL 3747604, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 89519
District Court, E.D. Wisconsin·Decided July 11, 2016·No. Case No. 15-C-720·Published·Cited by 2 cases

Opinion

[851]*851DECISION AND ORDER

William C. Griesbach, Chief Judge

In this action Plaintiff Karen Jones alleges that the Department of Veterans Affairs was negligent when it allowed a rolling chair to be present in the. carpeted waiting room of a clinic it operated in Appleton, Wisconsin. This court denied the Defendants’ motion to dismiss because it was conceivable some facts could emerge that would allow a factfinder to find negligence. The Defendants have now moved for summary judgment, arguing that discovery has produced no facts from which negligence could reasonably be inferred. For the reasons given below, the motion will be granted.

I. Background

The parties have stipulated to all of the material facts. The Plaintiff accompanied her husband to a medical appointment at the clinic in question, In the waiting room, there was a table with an unfinished puzzle and at least two chairs around it. One chair had wheels, while the other did not. The rolling chair was not one of the chairs normally present in the waiting room. Instead, it had apparently been moved into the waiting room from a nearby conference room, either by a clinic employee or a member of the public. The waiting room floor was carpeted with standard office-style carpeting. The Plaintiff sat down on the rolling chair. According to her, she did not notice that it had wheels, but there was nothing preventing her from noticing that fact. She recalls that the chair was positioned so that she did not have to move it at all prior to sitting down. She began working at the puzzle until, needing to reach a piece, she stood up. When she went to sit back down, however, the chair was no longer positioned underneath her. She fell and hit her tail bone and elbows on the floor.

II. Analysis

Under Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(a), a party is entitled to summary judgment if it - can show there is no genuine dispute regarding material facts and that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Carroll v. Lynch, 698 F.3d 561, 564 (7th Cir.2012). To establish a negligence claim, a plaintiff must prove: (1) the existence of a duty of care on the part of the defendant, (2) a breach of that duty of care, (3) a causal connection between the defendant’s breach of the duty of care and the plaintiffs injury, and (4) actual loss or damage resulting from the injury. Miller v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 219 Wis.2d 250, 260, 580 N.W.2d 233 (1998).

The focus in this case is on the duty of care owed by the clinic to the Plaintiff. The Plaintiff states that she had worked on a number of puzzles at various VA clinics over the years, but had, never sat on a chair with wheels before. She did not notice that the chair in question had wheels, and had no reason to believe it did have wheels since she had never sat in a rolling chair in a VA clinic before. Much of the Plaintiffs argument rests on the premise that wheeled chairs are inappropriate for clinic waiting rooms because many clinic visitors have ambulatory problems. According to Shirley Probst, a former nurse at the clinic, wheeled chairs can pose a hazard because many of the clinic visitors are elderly and'/ or have trouble with walking and balance. Thus, the Plaintiff argues that the clinic breached its general duty to the public at-large by having hazardous chairs in its waiting room.

The government argues that, in allowing a rolling chair to be present in the waiting room, it did not create an unreasonable risk of harm to the Plaintiff or anyone else. The Plaintiff has conceded that the chair in question is a standard office-style chair without any defects. The floor was level [852]*852and carpeted, making it unlikely that a chair with wheels would roll very much without being pushed. Moreover, chairs with wheels are not some sort of novelty— millions of such chairs are found in homes and offices around the world. The government also argues that even if such chairs might conceivably be unsuitable for those with ambulatory issues, the Plaintiff herself was not handicapped in any way, and so it is largely irrelevant that the chairs could have been dangerous for other visitors to the clinic.

The Plaintiff does not argue that rolling chairs are inherently dangerous, or even that they were dangerous to herself in particular. Instead, she asserts that such chairs could be dangerous to some people, and thus a rolling chair was inappropriate for use in a clinic waiting room. As Nurse Probst testified, such chairs pose a “slip, trip and fall hazard” (EOF No. 41-3 at 18:3) because a wheeled chair “could roll back or move when somebody was getting into it, especially if they were using an ambulatory aid.” (Id. at 18:11-13.)

The extent of the United States’ liability under the FTCA is generally determined by reference to state law. Molzof v. United States, 502 U.S. 301, 305, 112 S.Ct. 711, 116 L.Ed.2d 731 (1992). In negligence cases, Wisconsin courts have long followed the minority view of duty set forth in the dissent of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad. In that dissent, Judge Andrews explained that “[e]veryone owes to the world at large the duty of refraining from those acts that may unreasonably threaten the safety of others.” 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99, 103 (1928) (Andrews, J., dissenting). See Alvarado v. Sersch, 2003 WI 55, ¶ 13, 262 Wis.2d 74, 81, 662 N.W.2d 350, 353 (Wis.2003). “A defendant’s duty is established when it can be said that it was foreseeable that his act or omission to act may cause harm to someone. A party is negligent when he commits an act when some harm to someone is foreseeable.” Schuster v. Altenberg, 144 Wis.2d 223, 235, 424 N.W.2d 159, 164 (1988) (italics added).

In the Plaintiffs view, negligence is a question of fact that the court could resolve in her favor: because the safety of others (“harm to someone”) was threatened by the wheeled chair (according to Nurse Probst), the clinic breached a duty to the Plaintiff, as a member of the “world at large,” even though she herself did not have the ambulatory problems that allegedly made the chair hazardous in the first place. That is, if someone creates a hazardous condition, it does not matter that the condition was not hazardous to the particular plaintiff who was injured, or that the specific harm that ensued was not itself foreseeable. Morgan v. Pennsylvania Gen. Ins. Co., 87 Wis.2d 723, 732, 275 N.W.2d 660, 665 (1979) (“The risk need not be to the particular plaintiff. The test [in Wisconsin] is whether unreasonable risk to the world at large is created by the conduct.”); A.E. Inv. Corp. v. Link Builders, Inc., 62 Wis.2d 479, 486, 214 N.W.2d 764, 767 (1974) (“it is not necessary that either the person harmed or the type of harm that would result be foreseeable. The act or omission in the face of foreseeable harm was negligence.”) Thus, the fact that the Plaintiff was not elderly or handicapped in some fashion does not mean the Defendant had no duty toward her.

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Jones v. United States, 194 F. Supp. 3d 849, 2016 WL 3747604, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 89519 (E.D. Wis. 2016).

194 F. Supp. 3d 849 (Jones v. United States) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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