Court Opinion

ID: 9765822
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:21:16.391105+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:16.021252
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mu. Justice Musmanno:
I would affirm the lower Court’s granting of a new trial. Mr. Smith, Chief of Detectives for the defendant City Stores Company, did not deny that he threatened the youth Jon Millenson with police action unless he confessed to a crime he did not commit. Smith did not deny that behind the armor of this threat he accused the plaintiff of having taken a “credit book” and having fraudulently issued credit slips to a female confederate. He did not deny that he felt the plaintiff’s person to look for the missing credit book, nor did he deny that finding in the plaintiff’s wallet pictures of the plaintiff’s mother and girl friend he insultingly asked how they were connected with the crime.
All of this insolent conduct on the part of the store detectives was an attack on the plaintiff’s good name which cannot be taken lightly:
“He that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.”
Although Mr. Smith stated that if it was proved that Millenson was innocent he, Smith, would apologize, there is no evidence that he did so apologize, although Millenson’s innocence was conclusively established. Perhaps the plaintiff is unduly sensitive, but it is part of a man’s rights to be sensitive about an unjustified humiliating experience. The plaintiff could have belonged to that class of people who, in the words *43of Edmund Burke, possessed “that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound.”
The Court below concluded that that stain of dishonor which the unjust accusation inflicted had not been washed clean and, accordingly, in the interests of justice ordered a new trial.
I would affirm that order.