Court Opinion

ID: 8035818
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-09-09 03:20:41.912179+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:37:07.550946
License: Public Domain

Paine, J.,
dissenting.
An opinion was released in this case July 20, 1933, in which four judges of the supreme court sat, and three district judges, and in that opinion only one judge dissented. It was argued again to this court on January 15, 1934, and three judges sat who had not heard the case before. I voted for the opinion, found in 125 Neb. 269, and no new facts were brought out in the second argument, or new law presented, which have changed my mind. Plaintiff brings suit for false imprisonment, and, instead of proving her case by a preponderance of the evidence, her evidence as to imprisonment is entirely uncorroborated in any particular by the three other witnesses who were present at any time during her alleged incarceration.
In an exchange for a more expensive paint brush, she received $1.10 additional in cash, which she failed in any way to account for or ring up on the cash register. The representative of the Willmark System examined the cash register tape and found that the $1.10 had not been recorded, and she explained in the manager’s office that she kept the money because she needed it for bills because of sickness. He denies that she said to him that she left it on the cash register and it disappeared. After she had signed the two confessions, admitting taking money, she went to the rest-room, where she remained 30 minutes, and then she voluntarily went back to the manager’s office, and Mr. Sellers asked her why she had done it, and she answered she did not know. He told her to stop crying, to go home and come back the next afternoon, and the next day she promptly went to an attorney’s office and began an action for false imprisonment for $50,000. The testimony of the man who examined her was that the door was not closed, "and remained open all the time that she was in the room. The testimony is not disputed by her that, up to the time that she signed the confession of taking the first $1.10, no threats of any kind had been made to her, and that she signed the first confession of *372her own free will. The manager of the store was in his office, through a very thin board partition, and heard the hum of conversation, but not the words, and said that the entire conversation was conducted in a low tone by both of the parties. The only force used, that the plaintiff testified to, was this: That at one time she started to reach for a telephone on the table to call her husband, and that the telephone was pushed beyond her reach. This is absolutely denied, and rests solely upon her own evidence, and is disproved' .by two facts, namely, that when she was voluntarily remaining in the rest-room for 30 minutes, after the confession was all completed, she had no desire to, and did not, telephone her husband; and that when she voluntarily went back later to the office of the manager of the store to talk the matter over with him, and he asked her if she ought not to call her husband, she replied that her husband was not at home.
The evidence appears to show that this investigator was careful and cautious, his business was to detect stealing on the part of dishonest employees, and that from past experience, if for no other reason, he avoided the very things charged in this case. When she did confess, without any threats being made to her, by her own testimony, to the taking of the first $1.10 which she did not ring up because she needed it to pay bills because of sickness, he naturally asked her whether she had ever taken any other money belonging to the firm, and she admitted that she had been taking about $5 a day, and signed a written confession of this fact. This was her own confession, sitting quietly in the office, and of a fact not known to the investigator at all. The burden was upon the plaintiff to prove an unlawful restraint of her liberty. Taking her own testimony that she was called to the manager’s office and talked with an investigator in a room to which the door was closed a portion of the time and open a portion of the time, and the only force used, according to her own testimony, was in pushing a telephone beyond *373her reach, all of which facts are entirely unsupported by any other evidence, such evidence, I submit, does not prove her case by a preponderance of the evidence, and I am still of the opinion that our first opinion was right.