Court Opinion

ID: 9566266
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 19:35:42.367098+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:34:27.177015
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
On motion for rehearing appellee Orkin contends that in a record exceeding 2,000 pages, we have overlooked evidence not cited by either party which appellee argues pierced appellants’ affirmative defenses so as to render our holding in Division 4 (a) incorrect. This evidence is in the form of answers by appellants to appellee’s second interrogatories. The trial court recited that its judgment was based upon “review of the file of record.” A painstaking review of that record both by this court and by the trial court’s clerk’s office reveals that while the answers are twice present in the record, the interrogatories themselves were never filed. The answers do not reference the questions, and there is nothing in the deposition of appellant Blank, who was presented with those answers, to intimate what information the interrogatories sought in regard to the affirmative defenses in question. Although appellee in its brief quotes interrogatories which it alleges are the questions to the answers in the record, “ ‘[w]e cannot consider facts, related by briefs, which do not appear in the record sent up from the clerk of the lower court.’ [Cit.]” Johnson v. Shield Ins. Co., 189 Ga. App. 333, 334 (375 SE2d 510) (1988). Thus, whatever significance the answers allegedly may have when read together with the interrogatories, in the absence of the interrogatories it is readily apparent that the answers are not sufficient in and of themselves to pierce appellants’ affirmative defenses. Since this is not a situation in which we can construe interrogatory answers to uphold the judgment by presuming the questions propounded were asked in a form so as to authorize the judgment, compare Heard v. McKee, 26 Ga. 332, 342 (1858), appellee’s motion for rehearing is denied.
*474Decker & Hallman, Richard P. Decker, W. Winston Briggs, for appellee.