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Estate of Strever v. Cline6/27/1996
ence of opinion as to whether the action of a party other than the defendant is the intervening cause of the plaintiff's injury, summary judgment based on proximate cause is proper.
Graham, 767 P.2d at 304. For that reason, we overrule the statement in King that we quoted above and we reiterate that our holding in King is that "the intervening acts must be reasonably foreseeable to establish proximate cause."
Our prior cases involving intervening criminal acts discussed above involved fact situations that were properly disposed of by the trial courts as a matter of law. Nevertheless, we emphasize that a cause of action involving superseding intervening acts, whether criminal or non-criminal, normally involves questions of fact which are more properly left to the finder of fact for resolution. If, under the facts of a given case, an intervening criminal act is one which the defendant might reasonably foresee, then there is no reason why the fact finder should not decide causation the same as with any other intervening causation case. Three of our earlier cases, Lencioni v. Long (1961), 139 Mont. 135, 361 P.2d 455; Brown v. First Federal Sav. & L. Ass'n of Great Falls (1969), 154 Mont. 79, 460 P.2d 97; and Schafer v. State, Dept. of Institutions (1979), 181 Mont. 102, 592 P.2d 493, stand for a contrary rule — i.e. that no recovery can be allowed for an injury which resulted from an intervening criminal act of a third person. To that extent, we overrule those three cases and any other Montana authority espousing that rule.
Rather, trial courts must continue to carefully review each fact situation involving intervening criminal acts on a case-by-case basis, and it is only where reasonable minds could come to but one conclusion, that this issue is properly disposed of as a matter of law. See, for example, Kiger, 802 P.2d at 1251, where we affirmed the trial court's use of this same approach in granting summary judgment.
This is such a case. Here, not only were there two intervening criminal acts (two thefts from Susanj's vehicle), but there was also an intervening grossly negligent act (Cline, high on marijuana, waving the stolen gun around with his finger on the trigger, then trying to unload the weapon). Accordingly, on these facts, we conclude that reasonable minds could come to but one conclusion — that the series of intervening acts which included two criminal acts and one grossly negligent act was reasonably unforeseeable and, thereby, cut off all liability on the part of Susanj for Robert Strever's unfortunate death.
On the facts here, we hold that the District Court's grant of summary judgment was proper as any negligence by Susanj was superseded by the independent intervening criminal and grossly negligent acts described above.
Having, thus, analyzed and resolved the two legal issues in this case by application of Montana's statutory law, by application of the well-established rules enunciated in decisions previously handed down by this Court and by application of other well-reasoned authority, it is now necessary that we respond to the special concurrence. While waving the red flag of "gun control" and raising the specter of "banning firearms" guarantees inflammatory headlines and a spate of letters to the editor, as a matter of legal analysis the special concurrence grossly and unfairly misrepresents this Court's opinion and misstates the law.
At the outset, the special concurrence states that we have held that:
s a matter of law, a property owner owes a legal duty to a thief or a burglar who enters an owner's property on a mission of thievery, steals the owner's property, and then in
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