Tennessee State Youth Legislature Model Supreme Court Sample Brief

This sample brief is intended to assist students in preparing briefs for the Model Supreme Court. The facts presented, as well as the authorities cited, do not necessarily reflect any actual Tennessee judicial documents. Students should note that this brief presents the arguments of only one side in the case. Lawyer teams must write two briefs: one for Appellant/Petitioner and one for Appellee/Respondent.

Because formatting is difficult online, page breaks are marked with a line of asterisks. Also, page numbers and line spacing are not always correct, so be sure to refer to the Brief Writing Guidelines by following the link at the bottom of this page.

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IN THE YMCA MODEL SUPREME COURT FOR THE STATE OF TENNESSEE
AT NASHVILLE

CHARLES AND CYNTHIA NAPPAN,
)
Petitioners )
) Docket No. 4/3/99 -
VS ) 4/6/99
)
HOLIDAY HOUSE HOTEL, INC., )
)
Respondent )
__________________________________________________________

BRIEF FOR RESPONDENT
HOLIDAY HOUSE HOTEL, INC.
__________________________________________________________

ORAL ARGUMENT REQUESTED
Student's Name and
Partner's Name
Attorneys for Respondent,
Holiday House Hotel, Inc.
Name Of High School
Town, Tennessee 37073
(615) 851-3517


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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page

Questions Presented . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .i

Table of Authorities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

Statement of the Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Procedural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
Statement of Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Argument. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

I. THE TRIAL COURT PROPERLY GRANTED SUMMARY JUDGMENT
BECAUSE RESPONDENT DID NOT HAVE A DUTY TO PREVENT AN
UNFORESEEABLE KIDNAPPING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

A. Respondent owed guests only a duty of reasonable care to
protect them from foreseeable criminal misconduct, not a duty
to prevent sudden, unexpected criminal acts. . . . . . . . . . . . 3

B. The Hotel could not have foreseen the possibility of a
kidnapping of one of its guests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

C. The Hotel's enclosed design, security guards, and
guest-room door locks provided more than reasonable
protection for its guests against criminal misconduct. . . . . . . 5


II. THE TRIAL COURT PROPERLY FOUND PETITIONERS TO BE SO OVER-
WHELMINGLY NEGLIGENT AS TO BAR THEIR RECOVERY. . .. . . . . . . . .6


Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7



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QUESTIONS PRESENTED
I. Was the trial court correct in granting summary judgment for Respondent when the court held that the kidnapping of a child guest from his room was unforeseeable, and that Respondent had provided its guests with reasonable protection against criminal misconduct?


II. Was the trial court correct when it found Petitioners so overwhelmingly negligent, because they left their minor child alone in their unsecured hotel room, that they were barred from recovering on their claim that Respondent was negligent for failing to prevent the child from being kidnapped?

- i -
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TABLE OF AUTHORITIES
Pages

Associated Engineers v. Job, 370 F.2d 633 (8th Cir. 1967) . . . . . . 6

Brewer v. Roosevelt Motor Lodge, 295 A.2d 647 (Me. 1972) . . . . . . .3,5

Corey v. Kocer, 193 S.W. 2d 589 (Tenn. 1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Courtney v. Remler, 566 F.2d 658 (7th Cir. 1983) . . . . . . . . . . .5-6

Kveragas v. Scottish Inns, Inc., 733 F.2d 409 (6th Cir. 1984) . . . . 3-4

McCoy v. Gay, 302 S.E.2d 130 (Ga. 1983). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3-4

Mortensen v. Bradley, 349 S.W.2d 444 (Tenn. 1984). . . . . . . . . . .3

Nixon v. Royal Coach Inn of Houston, 464 S.W.2d 900 (Tex. 1971) . . . 5-6

Peters v. Holiday Inns, Inc., 278 N.W.2d 208 (Wis. 1979). . . . . . . 4-5

Phillips Petroleum Co. v. Dorn, 292 So. 2d 429 (Fla. 1974) . . . . . .3

Steinholz v. Modica, 264 S.W. 2d 514 (Tenn. 1978) . . . . . . . . . . 3
ii
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STATEMENT OF THE CASE
Statement of Facts

Respondent in this case, Holiday House Hotel, Inc. ("Hotel") owns and operates the Holiday House Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. Petitioners, Charles and Cynthia Nappan, are residents of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Petitioners, with their six-year-old son, arrived at Respondent's hotel on August 3, 1996. An agent/employee of Respondent checked Petitioners into the Hotel and gave them the keys to their room on the first floor. Petitioners' room was the third room along a closed hallway which begins in the Hotel lobby, goes through three successive right turns, and returns to the lobby. The Hotel was installing a video camera surveillance system in this hallway, but the system was not yet functioning on August 3, 1996. The hallway, and the guest rooms that open off of it, surround an internal courtyard. Guests and visitors to the Hotel may enter this courtyard only from the Hotel lobby or through a sliding glass door located in each guest room.

After their check-in, Petitioners registered complaints about the air conditioner in their room, and the Hotel's employee at the front desk assured Petitioners that he would look into the problem. The Hotel staff was very busy, however, because of the need to check-in other guests and prepare for a convention taking place at the Hotel that day. Many Hotel employees, including two security guards, were assigned to convention activities.

Soon after checking in, Petitioners opened the rear sliding door in their room, but they closed the door when they left for dinner. Upon returning to their guest room after dinner, Petitioners reopened the sliding door, leaving the screen door locked. At 8:00 P.M., Petitioner Cynthia Nappan left the guest room to find her husband, who had gone to the Hotel's front desk. When Ms. Nappan left the room, she left six-year-old Alex Nappan alone and asleep in the room with the rear sliding door still open. By the time Petitioners returned to their room, the room's rear screen door had been ripped off its tracks from the outside and Alex was missing.

No previous criminal activity had been reported on the Hotel premises, and the only similar incident reported in the area was a kidnapping which had occurred at a local shopping center several weeks earlier.

-1-
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Procedural History

Petitioners Mr. and Mrs. Charles Nappan filed a complaint in the Memphis Circuit Court on November 22, 1996, alleging that Respondent, Holiday House Hotel, Inc. was negligent in the kidnapping of their son, Alex Nappan, from the Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, on August 3, 1996. In their complaint, Petitioners charged that the Hotel owed Alex a duty of care to protect him from foreseeable harm, that the Hotel breached this duty, and that this breach was the proximate cause of Alex's kidnapping.

The Hotel admitted to most of the factual allegations made in the Petitioners' complaint but denied that it was in any way negligent. Consequently, the Hotel filed a motion for summary judgment on November 30, 1996. The Memphis Circuit Court granted the Hotel's motion for summary judgment on December 17, 1996, dismissing Petitioners' complaint. The court held that the Hotel was not responsible for the kidnapping because the kidnapper's actions were unforeseeable as a matter of law. The court also found that the Hotel had met the required standard of care owed to Petitioners. In addition, the court found Petitioners' action in leaving their child alone in a strange place to be overwhelmingly negligent, thus barring their recovery from Respondent.

Petitioners sought an appeal from the trial court's decision on January 19, 1997, which was granted by the YMCA Model Supreme Court for the State of Tennessee.

- 2 -
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ARGUMENT
I. THE TRIAL COURT PROPERLY GRANTED SUMMARY JUDGMENT BECAUSE RESPONDENT DID NOT HAVE A DUTY TO PREVENT AN UNFORESEEABLE KIDNAPPING.

A. Respondent owed guests only a duty of reasonable care to protect them from foreseeable criminal misconduct, not a duty to prevent sudden, unexpected criminal acts.

In the case at bar, Respondent requests that this Court join with virtually all other state courts and hold that an innkeeper has a duty to take "only ordinary or reasonable precautions to protect his guests against the unreasonable risk of harm from third parties." Phillips Petroleum Co. v._Dorn, 292 So. 2d 429, 432 (Fla. 1974). Because circumstances have changed drastically since feudal times when virtually no one was safe outside of castles and fortified towns, the court in Kveragas v. Scottish Inns, Inc., 733 F.2d 409 (6th Cir. 1984) held that an innkeeper is no longer an insurer held liable under all circumstances for injuries to his guests caused by third party criminal actions. Recognizing these changes, most courts flatly reject a higher duty of care that may place too great a burden on an innkeeper actually to prevent criminal acts against his guests, thus making him a virtual insurer of his guest's safety. Phillips, 292 So.2d at 431-432.

This Court has ruled in Steinholz v. Modica, 264 S.W.2d 514, 516 (Tenn. 1978) that a "possessor of land owes an invitee . . . the duty of exercising reasonable or ordinary care for his safety." Applying this standard in Mortensen v. Bradley, 349 S.W.2d 444 (Tenn. 1984) this Court held that a homeowner's duty of reasonable care to his paying boarder did not include the inspection of a defective ladder that caused the boarder's injuries. The holding in Mortensen should logically be extended to cases such as this, thus putting Tennessee in line with the majority view that innkeepers owe only a duty of reasonable care as to their guests.

Under a standard of reasonable care, the court in Brewer v. Roosevelt Motor Lodge, 295 A.2d 647 (Me. 1972) ruled a hotel must exercise due care to protect its guests against only reasonably foreseeable criminal misconduct. And, ruled the court in McCoy v. Gay, 302 S.E.2d 130 (Ga. 1983), an innkeeper does not have a duty to specifically prevent a sudden, unexpected criminal attack and, consequently, cannot be held liable for the guest's resulting harm.


B. The Hotel could not have foreseen the possibility of a kidnapping of one of its guests.

To determine whether an innkeeper should have reasonably anticipated criminal actions by a third party against one of his guests, the court in Peters v. Holiday Inns, Inc., 278 N.W.2d 208 (Wis. 1979) considered such factors as the extent of similar criminal activities previously occurring on the hotel's premises, within its immediate area, or in other local hotels. Using such an analysis in Brewer, 295 A.2d at 649, the Maine court affirmed a directed verdict for the innkeeper. In that case, a male intruder raped and assaulted a female guest after gaining access to her first floor hotel room by climbing through a bathroom window that she had left unlocked and open. Because such criminal activity was not prevalent either in the hotel's immediate area or in other similar local hotels, and because only one previous, unrelated burglary attempt had occurred on the premises, the court held that the innkeeper could not have reasonably foreseen the assault and rape, and he therefore did not have a duty to take precautions against it. Brewer, 295 A.2d at 652-653.

As in Brewer, the trial record of the instant case shows that no substantially similar incidents had occurred on the premises of the Holiday House Hotel. Nor does the record indicate any similar incidents at other hotels in Memphis, Tennessee. In Kveragas, 733 F.2d at 411, the court ruled that under such circumstances, no reasonable person could find that Respondent might have anticipated such a sudden, unprovoked kidnapping. Considering these facts, the trial court ruled that the kidnapping was unforeseeable as a matter of law and correctly granted Respondent's motion for summary judgment.


C. The hotel's enclosed design, security guards, and guest room door locks provided more than reasonable protection for its guests against criminal misconduct.

When evaluating the reasonableness of a hotel's precautions, the court should especially consider the effect of the hotel's design on its security measures, stated the court in Peters, 278 N.W. 2d at 212. The trial record reveals that Respondent fulfilled its duty of care by providing more than reasonable protection for its guests against criminal misconduct.

Even where an innkeeper has taken precautions that were quite inferior to those provided in the pending case, courts have held as a matter of law that the innkeeper did not breach his duty of reasonable care owed to his guests. Courtney v. Remler, 566 F. 2d 658, 662 (6th Cir. 1983); Nixon v. Royal Coach Inn of Houston, 464 S.W.2d 900, 901 (Tex. 1971). In Courtney, 566 F. 2d at 659 a guest opened her door to the knocking of two armed assailants who subsequently raped her. In contrast to the protective design in the present case, the hotel inCourtney was segmented into several buildings, so that anyone, including an assailant, could easily gain access to the guests' rooms without being seen. Even though such an assault was potentially foreseeable because the hotel was located in a "high crime" area, the guest's claim was dismissed by the court, which held that the hotel had taken reasonable precautions by installing adequate door locks and hiring one armed guard to patrol the premises. Courtney, 566 F. 2d at 664.

In Nixon, 464 S.W.2d at 901 a guest was assaulted by a third party as she was entering her "remote room in a desolate area" of the hotel. Although the innkeeper had not hired a security guard or taken any other comparable measures, the Texas court affirmed the hotel's summary judgment because the assault was an "intervening cause altogether disassociated with any act of omission or commission on the part of the appellee." Nixon, 464 S.W. 2d at 906. In light of the lesser precautions taken by the hotels in these two cases, this Court may easily extend the judicial logic presented and find that the Respondent Hotel's design, guards, and door locks constituted reasonable security measures as a matter of law.



II. THE TRIAL COURT PROPERLY FOUND PETITIONERS TO BE SO OVER-WHELMINGLY NEGLIGENT AS TO BAR THEIR RECOVERY.

In evaluating the quality of guest negligence in a similar case, the court in Associated Engineering v. Job, 370 F.2d 633 , 635 (8th Cir. 1967) suggested criteria that included the following: precautions guests took for their own safety, the extent to which they should have known of the risk involved through warnings or experience, and the foreseeability of injury from their action. Further, this Court in Corey v. Kocer, 193 S.W.2d 589, 592 (Tenn. 1972) held that reasonable standards of conduct should be considered in determining guest negligence.

By applying reasonable judicial standards to the undisputed facts of Petitioners' conduct as contained in the trial record, the lower court properly found Petitioners' overwhelming negligence sufficient to bar recovery.

No factual issue exists in the instant case to deny Petitioners' overwhelming negligence. Therefore, Respondent requests that this Court affirm the trial court's judgement in finding for Respondent.

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CONCLUSION
For the above stated reasons, Respondent requests the YMCA Model Supreme Court for the State of Tennessee at Nashville to affirm the judgement of the trial court.

Respectfully submitted,



_______________________
Student Name

_______________________
Student Name

Attorneys for Respondent
Name Of High School
Town, TN 37073
(615) 851-3517

April 3, 1999