Court Opinion

ID: 9534983
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:44:24.281559+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:09.033952
License: Public Domain

*230HENRIOD, Justice
(concurring and dissenting in part).
I concur in point 1, but not in point 2.
I think the question asked on cross-examination suggesting an amount obtained for severance damages at a forced sale was improper, clearly inadmissible and most prejudicial. The main opinion concedes this, and correctly points out that its impropriety would be as objectionable on direct examination. By way of apologia, however, it condones the whole thing by saying that “The trial court by denying a motion for a new trial clearly indicated that he considered that the State was not prejudiced by these questions.”
What the trial court “considered” cannot salve the wound of prejudice, nor purge its damage. Nor can the main opinion’s statement provide an elixir by repeating the oft-quoted aphorism that we will “overrule the trial court’s decision on a motion for a new trial only if we find an abuse of its discretion.” This does not meet head-on the urgence of prejudice. It loses sight of the fact that it is the question itself that is objectionable and prejudicial, incurable by any balm that may be administered by an answer, or by what the trial court thinks about the whole affair, — any commiseration by or our reverence for the trial court’s conclusion of nonprejudiciality to the contrary notwithstanding.
This writer finds it difficult to understand how, after paying homage to the trial court’s discretion, it should discount it, and then support it by a condemnatory-eulogistic approbation, saying, without basis in the record, that “As previously pointed out, the State did not move for a mistrial or press its claim of prejudicial error until after the verdict was returned.”
The quoted statement adds triteness to inaccuracy. The phrase had reference to point 1 of the main opinion anent the (impossible) suppression of female vocalism. This writer agreed on biological grounds, but the observation did not apply to point 2 having to do with a prejudicially-asked question. At the juncture where the questionable question was put, the plaintiff registered immediate and apparently disturbed protest. At that point the duty to take a look at prejudiciality was courtwise and counselwise. The fact that none thought of a mistrial motion, by no stretch of anyone’s imagination could inter the emphatic obj ections made to the questions, engrained in the record.
Backbone of the main opinion’s sustenance of the conclusion of non-prejudice, to the effect that “the State did not move for a mistrial or press its claim of prejudicial error until after the verdict was returned,” lacks vertebrae, since 1) plaintiff did not have to demand a mistrial, but needed only to object to the question to preserve its appellate rights under the rules, which it did, and since 2) it pressed its objection long before submission of the cr or return of the verdict, or entry of judgment.
*231This case should he remanded for proper hearing as to damages, applying principles as to admissibility of evidence with respect to previous forced sales and with a realistic approach to the easy approach of deciding things on a sort of kaleidoscopic interpretation of the ephemeral and elusive phrase “prejudicial error,” where one side invariably thinks its employment is dandy, as a determining phrase, hut which the other side invariably thinks is the employment of a flatulent design to arrive at a desired objective.