Opinion ID: 2199744
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: third rulings on questions put to manager of insurance carrier.

Text: The plaintiff's counsel asked the manager of the workmen's compensation insurance carrier for the plaintiff's employer, Ryan Stevedoring Company (Ryan) two questions to which objections were made and sustained. The first was in substance whether the way in which the plaintiff was injured would make any difference to the insurance carrier. The evident purpose of this question was to minimize an apparent discrepancy between what the plaintiff said in his statement to the insurance company as to how the accident happened and what he said in court. In the insurance statement there was no reference to having slipped on grease; in court it was the foundation of the plaintiff's claim. The question seems argumentative, and we find no error in the court's ruling on it. The other question was asked after the witness had testified that his company was still the insurer for Ryan. The question was this: They [presumably Ryan] are still doing business with Waterman Steamship Company [the defendant], are they not? The relevance of this question is not apparent. The appellant's brief states that this insurance company's representative was the only witness available to establish that Ryan Stevedoring Company although a separate corporation, is a subsidiary of Waterman Steamship Company. The appellant argues in this Court that the sustaining of an objection to this second question deprived him of the very important argument that the stevedore witnesses who violated the exclusion rule with the connivance of counsel for    the defendant, were actually employees of    a subsidiary of    the defendant. Certainly, the question asked was not whether Ryan was a subsidiary of the defendant, nor was there any proffer of proof to that effect, nor was it shown that this witness was qualified to testify on this subject. It would have required clairvoyance to have guessed that the answer to a question as to whether two companies were still doing business with each other would have shown that one was a subsidiary of the other. The question actually asked seems irrelevant; the unasked question was not presented for a ruling. We, therefore, cannot act on it. Rule 9 of the Rules of this Court Relating to Appeals.