Whose fault is this accident? Tony is driving down a busy road. He is going at exactly the speed limit. All of the sudden the car you are following slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a ball that bounces into the road and the four year old boy that is darting into the street after it. Tony immediately slammed on his brakes but could not stop in time. He crashed into the back of the car he was following.

You are probably thinking that Tony didn’t have a chance. He did everything he could to avoid the accident. If the car hadn’t stopped in front of Tony the accident would never have happened. This was a sudden emergency. This car accident could not have been Tony’s fault. Wrong!

In Kentucky you are required to have your car under control at all times. You should be able to avoid the car in front of you. There are very few fact scenarios where you would be involved in a rear end accident and it would be the fault of the car that was rear ended. One situation I can think of would be if a car suddenly cut in front of you from another lane without giving you ample distance and then stopped abruptly.

Kentucky does have a “Sudden Emergency” doctrine. This is considered a defense or a justification for a negligent act, such as slamming into the back of another car. The Kentucky Courts have defined a “sudden emergency” as a situation where a person is suddenly confronted by an emergency situation that allows no time for deliberation. There must be a choice made between alternative courses of action. You must voluntarily choose one over the other. 

This sounds like what happened to Tony, but the Kentucky Courts have recently addressed this issue in Robinson v. Lansford, Ky. App., 222 S.W.3d 242 (2006). Here a car, the plaintiff, stopped suddenly in front of the defendant. The defendant had stopped because he crashed into a car in front. This is called a chain reaction collision. The Court said this was a “sudden occurrence” and not a “sudden emergency”.  The Court reasoned that the defendant took no action as a result of the sudden encounter, such as swerving into the other lane of traffic. He was simply unable to avoid the collision.

The moral of the story: Under Kentucky law if you take no action as a result of a sudden encounter there is no “sudden emergency” and the accident is your fault. The bottom line is you should give yourself enough space between you and the car in front of you to stop no matter what. Expect the unexpected or you might end up being a defendant in a Kentucky accident case.    

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