Court Opinion

ID: 9654752
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 18:49:32.873108+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:13:13.121882
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Garwood,
dissenting.
I regret to be unable to agree that the trial court correctly refused a mistrial. The question was in effect a statement by counsel of inadmissible evidence that normally would be quite as prejudicial, as if counsel for the employee had similarly stated in a suit by the insurance carrier that the Board had awarded total and permanent disability. The statement is not “inflamatory” but one of the type which, in dealing with improper argument, we have usually held not curable by an appropriate admonition of the trial judge, while at the same time holding the “inflamatory” type to be curable. See Wade v. Texas Employeers Ins. Ass’n., 150 Texas 557, 244 S. W. 2d 197. There is no great difference between a statement by counsel made to a witness in the presence of the jury and one made by him to the jury in the course of argument. The importance of the error is not so much in the particular case as in the fact that, with our decision as a precedent, lawyers who are so inclined, may *21now with impunity transgress the rules and thus cause others to do the same in self defense, with resultant lowering of our standards of practice.
Opinion delivered December 10, 1952.
Rehearing overruled January 14, 1953.