Last week marked the end of at two-week civil trial in which Stevens County was one of the defendants. The trial was held in Spokane before a jury made up of people from Spokane County. This is a common practice when a county is involved in a lawsuit. The other defendant was a local logging company.

This case is about a traffic accident that occurred on Dead Medicine Road nearly 4 years ago. The vehicles involved were a logging truck and a pickup. The portion of Dead Medicine road where the crash occurred is designated a “primitive road.” This is a fairly common designation for roads in some of our mountainous areas. It means that the road is not maintained as other roads and can be very curvy and narrow in places.

The accident occurred in February when the roads were snow and ice and at a blind corner where there was limited sight distance. The county was named as a defendant and allegations were made that the county was negligent in not plowing the roadway to a sufficient width to allow the vehicles to pass safely. Basically, the attorney for the plaintiff claimed that the county road was the cause of the accident and not the speed or manner in which one or both of the vehicles was driven.

After hearing all the evidence and listening to the arguments of the attorneys, the jury decided that the county was not negligent.

Blaming the county is a tactic that is fairly common when there is insufficient insurance to cover the damages in a vehicle crash. Sometimes it borders on the ridiculous. For example, in another case, a speeding intoxicated driver failed to negotiate a fairly gentle curve in a local road and hit a tree, injuring himself and killing his likewise intoxicated passenger. The county was sued under the theory that the design of the curve and engineering of the road at that location was the cause of the crash.

During the course of discovery, a demand was made for all the design and engineering material for the road at that location. We could not locate any of the requested documents for the simple reason that the road has been there and had that curve for over 100 years and that any such documents, if they ever existed, had long ago been lost or destroyed.

Imagine how many drivers have managed to make it safely around that curve over the last 100 years! It is amazing that it was not until this speeding drunk failed to make the curve that his lawyer discovered the design flaw that made it happen! Is this ridiculous or what? Yes there is a flaw, but it was the presence of too much alcohol in the blood of the driver, not the road.