Court Opinion

ID: 9667520
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:47:54.924735+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:38.609451
License: Public Domain

On Appellant’s Motion for Rehearing, . 'No. 11,749.
HUGHES, Justice.
Appellant says:
“This is not a case wherein, as in the Matlock case, appellant’s counsel knew that the Transcript was in his office and simply claimed that he thought that one of his secretaries had mailed the Transcript, but'this is a case wherein the attorney was relying upon the Clerk to perform his statutory duty of forwarding same directly to the Court of Civil Appeals after having been requested to have done so. Appellant’s counsel does not have to anticipate the negligence of a duly elected official and appellant should not be charged with the failure of such an official to perform his duty in a proper manner since appellants were entitled to believe that the Clerk would send the Transcript directly to the Court of Civil Appeals after having been requested to do so as is the custom in all cases. To require appellant’s counsel to anticipate that a Clerk would commit such an act of negligence would make it possible for duly elected officials in many cases to destroy justice and the just right of appeals.”
Appellant cites no statute making it the duty of the Clerk to forward the transcript to the Court of Civil Appeals and we know •of none.1
The form of transcript prepared by the Supreme Court under Rule 376-a provides, in part: “The Clerk shall deliver the transcript to the party, or his counsel, who has applied for it * * Vernon’s Ann. Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, page 125, and Rule 386, id. provides that the appellant shall file the transcript with the Clerk of the Court of Civil Appeals.
If the clerk of the court below agreed or undertook to forward the transcript to this Court he did so in his unofficial capacity. The rule to be applied in such cases is found in Alexander v. Hagedorn, 148 Tex. 565, 226 S.W.2d 996, 1001, as follows:
“When respondent requested the district clerk to notify him when he should return to court to defend the *299suit he was requesting the clerk to undertake something that the latter was in no sense required to do in his official capacity. So, as to that, the clerk became respondent’s agent, and negligence of the clerk must be charged to respondent; it became his own negligence.”
The motion is overruled.
Motion overruled.

. Art. 843, Vernon’s Annotated Codo of Criminal Procedure makes it the duty of the trial court clerk to forward the transcript to the Court of Criminal Appeals.