Court Opinion

ID: 9702908
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:31:16.70311+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:43.293265
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Flood, J. :
I cannot subscribe to the extent of the reduction made by this Court in the master’s fee allowed by the hearing judge. In my opinion this Court has shifted the financial balance too strongly against the master, who admittedly spent 404 hours — roughly one-fifth of a working year — on this case, in favor of the plaintiff, an osteopathic physician with a comfortable income.
The concurring opinion suggests that the master must bear the responsibility for an inordinately long record and should not profit by failing to keep the case within reasonable bounds. When the case was submitted to us we were not asked to read the 2,000 pages of testimony and we have not done so. Until it is examined, while we may agree that it is very long, I do not understand how we can tell whether it is inordinately long.
The record which we do have before us consists only of the petition for the master’s fee and that of counsel *152for the defendant, the answers thereto, the reply of the master and the testimony taken on these petitions. This shows the following: An admission, in the answer of the plaintiff who is contesting the fee, of the master’s averment that “the record shows that your petitioner adhered strictly to the rules of evidence in the conduct of these hearings, confining the evidence to that which was relevant and material, rejecting duplication, and stopping quarreling and bickering, with due consideration for justice and the rights of the parties, thus confining the time spent to a minimum” (R. 7a, 11a).
In view of this specific admission by plaintiff’s counsel who is opposing this petition so strenuously, I do not see how we can conclude without reading the full record in the divorce case that this statement made by a reputable member of the bar, concurred in by another who is opposing his petition (R. 7a-lla) is wholly wrong. At the hearing on this petition counsel opposing it made the following statement (R. 39a) :
“This is a difficult situation I am presented with. Mr. O’Brien spent considerable time on this case. He did a very good job. He worked hard and I have no reason to doubt or question his testimony as to the time he spent on it.
“My only situation is that when the case was started no one anticipated it would take as long or require as much testimony as was actually required. Unfortunately, the case was contested. In order to make out a case for my client, I was obliged to let the defendant ramble on and on, because I had to make her lose her case rather than try to win it through the plaintiff. I had to let her contradict herself and to do that, I had to let her ramble on and had to use up many pages of testimony.”
When a divorce is sought in Pennsylvania upon the ground of indignities, the plaintiff must prove not single acts of neglect, hostility or harassment, but a *153course of conduct making his condition intolerable and his life burdensome. The course of conduct which the plaintiff seeks to prove here covered a period of fifteen years. He offered not only his own testimony but also that of two of the children of the parties, now living with him, to prove these events. His wife is bitterly contesting his suit, and she offered not only her own testimony but that of the other two children, now living with her, to contradict him. All six testified concerning events of these fifteen years (although some of the children were too young to remember their beginnings) and it appears from a cursory inspection of the testimony that all but one were cross-examined at some length. It is no easy task to extract the truth from conflicting statements of the events of fifteen years of married life about which all the principal witnesses are apt to be emotional and have no doubt been rationalizing their own conduct over the years and in preparation for the trial. Eobert Browning in exploring the ancient murder case in “The King and the Book” evoked no more witnesses than were called here. Yet he used more than 20,000 highly concentrated pentameters to discover for his readers the “pure crude fact secreted from man’s life when hearts beat hard”.
Twenty-three years of trial court experience have not persuaded me that in determining credibility there is any substitute for vigorous cross-examination of each important witness by adverse counsel and close analysis of the testimony by the fact-finder. And if the judge is to be assisted in his determination as he should be, the master should set forth his analysis fully. As against this analysis, personal observation of the witnesses appears to me a poor measuring rod of credibility.
The events of a troubled married life of fifteen years cannot usually be properly assessed by a selected brief sample of the manifestations of a marital illness *154whose symptoms may vary from year to year or even from day to day. Undue limitation of examination can defeat justice perhaps more surely than undue delay. The golden mean is never easy to achieve and unless and until we read the testimony in this case I do not see how we can determine that there has been undue extension of the hearings or of the master’s report. There were hints at the argument that this bitterly contested divorce is not over and the day may come when we shall have to read this long record. Until we have done so, it appears to me that we must accept the uncontradicted testimony of two officers of this Court as to its propriety.
There is evidence in the record to justify the hearing judge’s conclusion that the plaintiff’s gross income averaged much more than the figures found by this Court (R. 76a-78a). His net income may well have been as high as $16,000 per year. Even on the figures accepted by this Court the plaintiff’s net income for the year 1960 was over $10,000.
By contrast, the fee allowed to the master, as reduced by this Court, is at a rate which would give him an annual gross income of no more than $15,000. If we were to ask the hearing judge to take evidence as to the expenses of operating a law office in Philadelphia, I feel sure that the master’s net annual income on this basis would be less than $7,500.
The plaintiff paid the court stenographer in this case $2,622.80. The hearing judge concluded that $686 of his annual salary should be allocated to the case, based upon the time spent in the hearings. Therefore the stenographer has netted $3,288.80 from this case against the $3,000 allowed to the master who must pay his own expenses from the allowance.
This Court has several times stated that the financial position of the husband must be taken into consideration in fixing the master’s fee and I agree with this *155principle. But it is shifting too much of the load to require an able and experienced member of the bar, who conscientiously performs his function as master in a lengthily contested divorce case, to accept the fee allowed by the majority in order to make the burden of cost easier for a plaintiff financially situated as this plaintiff seems to be.
It is to be noted that the hearing judge in his opinion stated that plaintiff’s counsel, in chambers, had said that he believed that an additional fee of $2,500 (which would make the master’s total compensation more than $4,400) was proper. The plaintiff, in his brief, does not challenge the trial judge’s recollection on this point. He did take the trouble specifically to point out that he did not agree to $25 per hour except for the actual time spent in hearings, but said nothing about the judge’s statement with reference to the additional $2,500 except to say he thought it was dehors the record.
Prior to a reading of the full record in this case I cannot concur in reducing this fee by more than half the amount allowed by the hearing judge.