Court Opinion

ID: 9831011
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 20:42:12.824306+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:43:29.347354
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
[2] Appellants earnestly insist that we erred in refusing to consider the first five assignments of error contained in their brief. Those assignments were stricken out upon motion of appellees because they were not copies of the grounds assigned for a new trial in the court below. By act of the Thirty-Third Legislature (Gen. Laws. 1913, p. 276), article 1612 of the Revised Civil Statutes is so amended as to provide that:
“Where a motion for new trial has been filed that the assignments therein shall constitute the assignments of error and need not be repeated by the filing of the assignments of error.”
The first five assignments of error are in no sense even substantial copies of the assignments in the motion for new trial, and for that reason we sustained the motion to strike them out. In appellant’s brief the first three assignments are grouped, and following the third is a copy of the first paragraph of the plaintiffs’ motion for a new trial. Each of those assignments concludes with a statement that the question therein presented is fully raised in the first paragraph of the motion for new trial. The fourth assignment concludes with the statement that the question therein raised is presented in the second paragraph of the motion for new trial, a copy of which follows the assignment. The fifth assignment concludes with the statement that the question therein presented is raised in the third paragraph of the motion for new trial. We are clearly of the opinion that we did not err in striking out those assignments. Edwards v. Youngblood, 160 S. W. 288. But the error, if any, in that ruling worked no injury to appellants because substantially the same questions presented in the assignments stricken out were involved in the sixth assignment and were duly considered in our discussion of that assignment.
Appellants further insist that we were in error in enumerating the fact of the execution of the deed of trust itself as a circumstance tending to support the judgment of the trial court. It is insisted that such fact could not be legally considered as evidence tending to show an abandonment of the property in controversy as a homestead. Independent of that circumstance, we are of the opinion that the other circumstances enumerated in the former opinion, together with the fact that the testimony of appellants, themselves, who of course were interested parties, was the evidence chiefly relied on by them to support their claim of homestead, were sufficient to sustain the judgment of the trial court. H. E. & W. T. Ry. Co. v. Runnels, 92 Tex. 305, 47 S. W. 971; Heierman v. Robinson, 26 Tex. Civ. App. 491, 63 S. W. 657; Smith v. Milam, 143 S. W. 293; and other authorities there cited.
The motion is overruled.
SPEER, J., not sitting.