Marylanders who slip and fall on ice this winter will have an easier time getting juries to hear personal-injury claims stemming from those mishaps. Two recent decisions from the state’s highest court say people only assume the risk of walking on ice if they actually knew the ice existed, not just that a path might be slippery.
Under Maryland law, to argue an “assumption of risk” defense, the defendant must show that the person filing suit knew the risk of danger, understood that risk and voluntarily confronted it.
That’s a question usually left for juries to decide, and the two recent rulings from the Maryland Court of Appeals say trial judges in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties were wrong to throw out suits before letting juries hear the cases.
In one case, George Poole, a medical company courier, sued a construction company doing work at a Clarksburg lab where he made deliveries and the building’s owner after he fell on a patch of black ice in the parking lot, saying both failed to prevent, warn of or remove the ice.
Poole testified that he had previously walked through the stream of water in which he fell several times and believed it was the safest path through the snowy lot.
A judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Poole was aware of icy conditions and therefore assumed the risk of falling.
But the Court of Appeals opinion said that was an error because “one’s ability to identify black ice, when by its nature it is not perceivable or knowable until the moment of experience, means the danger is not necessarily patent.”
A jury should have been allowed to consider whether Poole’s claims were valid, the appeals court wrote.
The ruling overturns a 2007 intermediate appellate court decision that said people assumed the risk in nearly all slip-and-fall cases, even when that risk may not have been fully known and understood.
In a second opinion, decided four days after the Poole ruling, the court said a judge shouldn’t have tossed the complaint of a Laurel woman who fell walking out of her apartment and sued the complex’s owner.
The woman, Mary Thomas, had walked in and out of her building several times that day, there was no visible water and the temperature had just dropped to subfreezing levels shortly before the fall, so it’s not certain that she knew of the black ice, the appeals court wrote.
