It came out of nowhere. Almost every crash has a version of that sentence, and Texas law has a name for the version a defendant can take to a jury: sudden emergency. It is not the free pass it sounds like. It is an instruction, and the conditions that limit it are written into it.
Sudden emergency. The instruction, in the form a defendant asked for it and the Texas Supreme Court quoted it, reads: “When a person is confronted by an ‘emergency’ arising suddenly and unexpectedly, which was not proximately caused by any negligence on his part and which, to a reasonable person, requires immediate action without time for deliberation, his conduct in such an emergency is not negligence or failure to use ordinary care if, after such emergency arises, he acts as a person of ordinary prudence would have acted under the same or similar circumstances” (Thomas v. Oldham). Four conditions are packed into that sentence. The emergency came suddenly and unexpectedly. The driver’s own negligence did not cause it. It called for action with no time to deliberate. And once it arose, he acted as a careful person would have.
What kind of thing it is. In Texas it is an inferential rebuttal, a defense that “operates to rebut an essential element of the plaintiff’s case by proof of other facts” (Dillard v. Texas Electric Cooperative). It is not a separate question the jury answers yes or no. The rule is blunt: “Inferential rebuttal questions shall not be submitted in the charge” (Texas Rule of Civil Procedure 277). It comes in as an instruction beside the one question that matters, whether each party’s negligence caused the crash. Its purpose, in the Court’s words, is “to advise the jurors, in the appropriate case, that they do not have to place blame on a party to the suit if the evidence shows that conditions beyond the party’s control caused the accident in question or that the conduct of some person not a party to the litigation caused it” (Dillard).
Its sibling. Unavoidable accident is “an event not proximately caused by the negligence of any party to it,” and that instruction “is ordinarily given in cases involving environmental conditions such as fog, snow, sleet, wet or slick pavement, or obstruction of view” (Reinhart v. Young). The Court has warned of “the risk that the jury will be misled or confused by the perception that the instruction represents a separate issue distinct from general principles of negligence” (Reinhart, quoting Hill v. Winn Dixie Texas), and that “giving multiple instructions on every possible rebuttal inference has the potential to skew the jury’s analysis in the other direction” (Dillard).
Where it stops. The limit is in the instruction itself: an emergency “not proximately caused by any negligence on his part.” That is the argument against it in most rear-end and bad-weather crashes. A following driver has to keep “an assured clear distance” so that, “considering the speed of the vehicles, traffic, and the conditions of the highway,” he “can safely stop without colliding” (Transportation Code Section 545.062). Every driver has to keep to a speed that is “reasonable and prudent under the conditions and having regard for actual and potential hazards then existing,” and to slow down when “a special hazard exists with regard to traffic, including pedestrians, or weather or highway conditions” (Section 545.351). Traffic that stops ahead on a Houston freeway and rain on the pavement are the kinds of traffic and weather conditions the statutes tell a driver to account for. The argument writes itself: a driver who was too close or too fast did not meet an emergency; he met the consequence of the distance and the speed he chose, which is what The Gap and Failed to Control Speed are about.
The record decides it. Even a real emergency does not excuse everything after it: the instruction asks whether, “after such emergency arises,” the driver acted as a person of ordinary prudence would have. And a driver’s own account does not, by itself, require the instruction. In a Houston case, a City driver testified that the car ahead began a U-turn when it was only two or three car lengths in front of him, while he was going the posted 35 miles an hour. The City asked for the sudden emergency instruction, the trial court refused it, and the Texas Supreme Court agreed that, “under the facts of this case,” refusing it “was not an abuse of discretion” (Thomas v. Oldham). Whether there was time is a question of evidence: the speed and braking the car’s recorder logged in the seconds before impact, video, following distance, sightlines, and the perception and reaction time that The Reaction explains.
An emergency is something that happens to a careful driver. A car stopped ahead of a driver who was following too close is not the emergency the instruction describes. It is the reason the following-distance rule exists.
The law: Thomas v. Oldham, 895 S.W.2d 352 (Tex. 1995); Dillard v. Texas Electric Cooperative, 157 S.W.3d 429 (Tex. 2005); Reinhart v. Young, 906 S.W.2d 471 (Tex. 1995) (quoting Hill v. Winn Dixie Texas, Inc., 849 S.W.2d 802 (Tex. 1992)); Tex. R. Civ. P. 277; Tex. Transp. Code § 545.062 and § 545.351. General information, not legal advice.
