Court Opinion

ID: 9585121
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:56:38.946214+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:28:53.029389
License: Public Domain

Frankum, Judge,
dissenting. I dissent from the ruling made by the majority of the court in Division 1 of the opinion and from the judgment of reversal in this case. I am aware, of course, of the well established rule that the court should not charge the jury in a contradictory manner so as to leave the jury in a confused position of having to pick and choose between a correct and an incorrect charge. But in this case, an examination of the entire charge together with a reading of the charge complained of in its proper context leaves, in my opinion, no doubt that prior to the enactment of the Appellate Practice Act of 1965, as here interpreted and applied, the charge in this case would not have been error. Prior to this decision it has always been the law in Georgia that in ascertaining whether a portion of the charge excepted to is error it must be read in its context, that is, in connection with what had been charged before and what was charged thereafter, and while a portion of the charge when read alone may seem to be error, if upon examination of the whole charge, it does not appear that the jury could have been misled or confused, the charge will not be cause for the grant of a new trial merely because it was, in some small particular, inaccurate or incomplete. Nor was it prior to the decision rendered by the majority in this case “. . . incumbent upon the judge, in instructing the jury with respect to different legal propositions that they are to consider, [in rendering their verdict] to repeat, in connection with the instruction on each proposition, all of the other qualifications and elements that they are to consider in reaching their verdict. It is sufficient if all of the essential qualifications and elements are covered in the charge as a whole.” Spainhour v. Nolind, 97 Ga. App. 362, 365 (103 SE2d 154). See also in this connection, Sims v. Martin, 33 Ga. App. 486, 487 (126 SE 872); Neville v. National Life &c. Ins. Co., 36 Ga. App. 8 (1) (135 SE 315); General Oil Co. v. Crowe, 54 Ga. App. 139, 147 (187 SE 221); Southern R. Co. v. Gale, 103 Ga. App. 87, 90 (118 SE2d 742); Terry v. Buffington, 11 Ga. 337, 343; Livingston v. Taylor, 132 Ga. 1 (1) (63 SE 694); Ellis v. Britt, 181 Ga. 442, 447 (182 SE 596).
*127■ Under the foregoing authorities the charge held in the first division of the majority opinion to be error most certainly would not have been held to constitute reversible error prior to the passage of the 1965 Appellate Practice Act. That Act was an Act changing procedure and providing in Section 17 thereof that as a prerequisite to assigning error on the charge of the court counsel must have called the court’s attention to the erroneous charge and thus have afforded the court an opportunity to correct its error, if any. The purpose of that section was to limit the right of the parties to complain of a merely erroneous charge which was not likely to have been harmful. What the court is doing here amounts to raising the act of calling to the court’s attention an allegedly erroneous charge to the dignity of a request to charge and saying that any time the trial judge fails to correct a charge contended to be erroneous no matter how insignificant or harmless such error may have been, he risks being reversed if he refuses to take notice of the objection to the charge.
It most certainly was not the purpose of the section of the Appellate Practice Act, above referred to, to change or modify in any way the substantive law so as to require this court or the Supreme Court to hold that a charge which had not, prior to the enactment of that section of the Appellate Practice Act, been held to be cause for reversal. But, this is the undoubted effect of the ruling which the court now makes, and in so ruling, I think it commits error.
I am authorized to state that Presiding Judge Nichols and Judge Deen concur in this dissent.