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McQuay v. Schertle6/2/1999
plaintiff had violated T.A. ยง 21-304(c), which prohibits driving off the traveled portion of the roadway. We reversed, noting that even assuming that the plaintiff had violated that statute by her conduct, the only connection between the statutory violation and the accident was that by random chance, it placed her in harm's way. We held that such a fortuitous link between a statutory violation and the happening of an accident is legally insufficient to satisfy the proximate cause element of contributory negligence.
Likewise, if Rebecca Wozniak ran afoul of the fire hydrant parking regulation by parking within 15 feet of a fire hydrant, her doing so was not a proximate cause of the fatal accident. As we have discussed, reasonable jurors could have found on the evidence presented that Ms. Wozniak did not exercise due care for her own safety in several ways, including by choosing to stop her car on the travel lane of an industrial roadway at night, and that her decision to stop her car where she stopped it proximately caused her death. Yet, the distance in feet from the point at which Ms. Wozniak stopped her car and the nearest fire hydrant had no bearing on the happening of the accident, except in the most random and attenuated way.
To be sure, had Ms. Wozniak diligently eliminated all points within a 15 foot radius of the fire hydrant in choosing a spot to park, her car would not have been in the Taylor tractor's path when it emerged from Shed 3B. Accordingly, her failure to park at a point that was not more than 15 feet from the fire hydrant may have been a "cause in fact" of the accident - just as the fact that she drove to the marine terminal that day at all was such a cause - in that, "but for" that conduct, the accident would not have happened. See BG&E;v. Lane, 338 Md. 34, 51 (1995)(holding that proximate cause element of negligence is satisfied if the negligence "is 1) a cause in fact of the injury and 2) a legally cognizable cause."). See also Robb v. Wancowicz, 119 Md. App. 531, 545, cert. denied, 350 Md. 278 (1998)(holding that for wrongful conduct to be a proximate cause of the injury, it first must be a cause in fact of the injury; i.e., but for the wrongful conduct, the injury would not have occurred.) It was not, however, a legally cognizable cause of the accident. As the Court of Appeals has explained, whether a cause is "legally cognizable" is essentially a question of "fairness and social policy." BG&E;v. Lane, supra, at 51.
In this case, while the precise location at which Ms. Wozniak stopped her car played a central role in the happening of the accident, and while it may have been careless for her to have stopped her car where she did, the proximity of her car to the fire hydrant outside of Shed 3B was irrelevant to the occurrence of the accident. It would be unfair under that circumstance to permit the jury to draw a legally meaningful causal link between Ms. Wozniak's violation of the fire hydrant regulation and her death. See Northern Central Railway Co. v. Geis, 31 Md. 357, 365 (1869)(holding that the trial court erred in instructing the jury that violation by the defendant of an ordinance prohibiting parking on a sidewalk could be evidence of negligence: "There was no evidence showing, or tending to show, that the accident was occasioned by the act or from the fact of violating the City Ordinance by the defendant, even if it be conceded that the car in which the deceased was injured, occupied at the time, a forbidden place on the street. The whole subject of this instruction was apart from the real questions involved in the case, and, therefore, calculated to mislead the minds of the jury . . ."). Moreover, being caught in the oncoming path of a tractor i
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