Opinion ID: 1447258
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: admission of maren pangarov testimony

Text: Defendant urges as error the court's admission of the testimony of plaintiff's father, Maren Pangarov, to which she had objected on the ground that it related to the contract and transactions of a deceased person and was prohibited by § 1-140, W.S. 1957. Her reasoning is that under the pleadings and issues of the case plaintiff's claim was based on an alleged contract between decedent and Maren Pangarov. Reference is made to a number of encyclopedic authorities purporting to indicate that plaintiff's father would here be a real party in interest, and if such, disqualified under the statute. It is unnecessary to identify or discuss these references since they are quite general and seem to focus on the holding in Kessler v. Kessler, Wyo., 380 P.2d 770, part of which counsel quotes with the intimation that it is applicable here. We find the facts in the Kessler case are so dissimilar to those now before us that the drawing of an analogy is unwarranted. This is especially true since the weight of authority holds that one entering into a contract for the benefit of a third party is not an incompetent witness to testify in respect thereto in the beneficiary's action against the estate. Annotation, 149 A.L.R. 1130, 1132; 58 Am.Jur. Witnesses § 297. That rule has been aptly applied in Sussman v. Barash, 157 Colo. 124, 401 P.2d 608, 610-611. No reason is pointed out to us why it should not govern in the present situation, and we observe no error in the court's ruling.