Sarah B. Kline v. 1500 Massachusetts Avenue Apartment Corporation, 439 F.2d 477 (1970)

Citation: Sarah B. Kline v. 1500 Massachusetts Avenue Apartment Corporation, 439 F.2d 477 (1970)
Parent Document: Sarah B. Kline v. 1500 Massachusetts Avenue Apartment Corporation, 439 F.2d 477 (1970)
Jurisdiction: DC (municipal)
Effective Date: 1970-09-08
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/295292/sarah-b-kline-v-1500-massachuset... ↗

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One difficulty here is that the trial court sitting without a jury held as a matter of law that there was no rule requiring the operator of the apartment building to use due care to exclude intruders by locking doors or posting doormen at entrances so as to protect tenants against crimes committed by intruders and others. It never considered whether the facts proved liability if the duty did exist. Against such a procedural background the panel opinion here comes to a different conclusion on the duty owed by the landlord to its tenants and then proceeds to find defendant liable on the facts as a matter of law. This necessarily involves a de novo consideration of the facts on a cold record and subjects the result to all the imperfections inherent in any decision arrived at under such handicaps. Here, those handicaps are magnified by the fact that the case was tried to the court without a jury and this necessarily had some tendency to steer the facts toward the issues that became uppermost in the court’s mind as the case progressed and away from the issues upon which the court now reverses the trial court. The result in my view is a record that cannot support the panel decision.

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