Court Opinion

ID: 9472892
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:14:10.54242+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:13.119691
License: Public Domain

RANDALL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
One of the material factual issues in this case, for the jury to decide, is the nature of the bank’s actual process of posting. The district court’s written instructions on the “process of posting” are correct because they expressly mention that the process means the “usual procedure” followed by the bank including (if the bank determines to include in that procedure) ascertaining that sufficient funds are available. The court’s oral charge, however, conflicts with the written instructions. While the panel opinion, in text, cites one sentence from the oral charge, the full charge (set out in note 2 of the panel opinion) makes clear that the district court did, in fact, resolve a question of fact that was for the jury, not just once but several times:
Perhaps it will be best for me to start out talking about this case in this manner. Discussing the verdict form. Do not take anything I tell you about the verdict or about this case without considering everything I have told you, because I am going to try to simplify it for you and it may be an oversimplification and may not be fair. You consider everything I have said and remember that the law that governs your answer to the verdict, because there is only one question going to be asked of you, is in this two-page sheet — in these two sheets of paper.
What do you have here? You have plaintiff and you have defendant. And plaintiff is basically coming to you and saying to you or alleges and contends that, in effect, that check came into the Pan American Bank, and now Texas Commerce Bank, had already been, let us say for our purposes, completely and totally processed. And if you believe from the evidence that it had been totally and completely processed, which means — I think everybody agreed to that but you take it the way the law is and the way you remember it — that it was already filed, then the bank is subject to paying that. That, simply speaking, is what is before you.
The bank says, on the other hand, not so. We never completed processing that, under our procedures and as the law requires before we have to pay it. As a matter of fact, it was never filed.
And that’s the position of both parties. What you are being asked from this verdict is a very simple question. It is really being asked — asking to find from a preponderance of the evidence — remem*1176ber what that was — that the items in question — the items in question are two checks — were finally paid by the processing — by the computer processing of posting, as I am going to completely define to you, before the bank returned the checks.
If you are satisfied from the preponderance of the evidence that the entire processing of posting had already been concluded, and that check was already in that file drawer, those two checks were in that file drawer, then you should answer that question “Yes.” But if you are not so satisfied by a preponderance of the evidence, then you should answer that question “No.” (Emphasis added.)
In summary, under the oral instructions, “completely processed ... means ... that it was already filed.” That constitutes a resolution by the district judge of a material factual issue in the case. Because the oral and written instructions are contradictory and confusing, I would reverse and remand for a new trial.