313 Mass. 757 | Mass. | 1943
The plaintiffs’ intestate, while walking across Concord Street in Framingham on December 31, 1935, was struck and killed by an automobile driven by the defendant. The jury found for the plaintiffs for $500, being the minimum amount recoverable for death under G. L. (Ter. Ed.) c. 229, § 5, before the amendment of that section by St. 1941, c. 504, § 3. The plaintiffs, feeling aggrieved that the verdict was not larger, press their exceptions to the admission of certain evidence and.to a part of the charge.
1. The plaintiffs introduced, as an admission by the defendant, evidence that the defendant had pleaded guilty in a District Court to a complaint charging him with having
2. In the course of his charge the judge instructed the jury as to the interpretation of that sentence of G. L. (Ter. Ed.) c. 90, § 14, which reads, “Upon approaching a pedestrian who is upon the traveled part of any way and not upon a sidewalk, every person operating a motor vehicle shall slow down.” Under the familiar rule prevailing in this Commonwealth, violation of this statute by the defendant would be evidence of negligence ana would bear upon the degree of the defendant’s culpability under the death’"statute. The judge mentioned the fact that § 14 does not prescribe any speed to which the driver shall “slow down” and then said that “As far as this particular provision is concerned, if you are going at seventy and you slow to sixty, you observe the law.” If this had been all the judge said, we might have difficulty in sustaining a construction of the statute so literal as to leave it practically meaningless. But this was not all the judge said. He told the jury in the same connection that “there is the general command that at all times you shall operate your car at a reasonable and proper speed.” G. L. (Ter. Ed.) c. 90, § 17. In this way he gave to the jury, in effect, the
Exceptions overruled.