Court Opinion

ID: 9651733
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:33:40.633509+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:38.544709
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
On petition for rehearing the insurer argues that our opinion has ignored the rule that a mere omission to charge is not ground for reversal in the absence of a request for a specific instruction.
As the opinion suggests, the situation seemed to us to be a bit beyond the scope and purpose of this rule. The proceedings indicated that the jury was confused and legally unable to determine the poisoning issue from the court’s instructions. The exclusive emphasis in the evidence upon the scientific concept of poisoning had tended to make the bare instruction that the jury was to determine from the evidence whether the insured died from poisoning imply that the question was to be resolved on the basis of scientific concept. The beneficiary, while not tendering or requesting a specific instruction, had, by her exceptions to the charge, challenged the unqualified concept of the instruction. And finally, the court’s failure to limit or qualify this implication, after the challenge, suggested that any request for an instruction on popular concept or standard would have been futile.
But if these views seem too liberal an absolution of the beneficiary’s failure to request a specific instruction, as the insurer argues, there is another element in the situation that still would require our reversal to stand. The poisoning question here was compositely one of law and fact. It could be made one of mere fact only by the court’s elimination of its legal aspect through a controlling instruction. This not having been done, the interrogatory “Was the insured’s death the result of poisoning?” submitted to the jury, under the circumstances of the case, a question of law and fact for specific answer. Rule 49 (b) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 28 U.S.C.A. following section 723c, authorizes the submission only of pure fact questions by way of special interrogatories. Cf. Carpenter v. Baltimore & O. R. Co., 6 Cir., 109 F.2d 375. The Rule further requires that the court shall give “such explanation or instruction” as may be necessary to enable the jury competently to answer the interrogatories submitted. That certainly cannot be claimed to have been done here, for, as suggested above, if the jury was to be able to answer the poisoning interrogatory as a fact question alone, it was necessary that the court first eliminate its inherent legal aspect by some sufficient explanation or instruction, either in the general charge or in connection with the special interrogatory.
The beneficiary objected to the submission of the special interrogatory and has assigned the giving of it as error.
We do not imply, of course, that the submission of any improper interrogatory necessarily is reversible error—any more than we have previously implied in the opinion that a party can escape the effect generally of his failure to request a specific instruction in relation to a general verdict. But the submission of an improper special interrogatory, or the submission of a special interrogatory without such explanation or instruction as will enable the jury competently to answer it, manifestly may constitute reversible error where the record is convincing that the answer made to the special interrogatory has determined the result of the jury’s general verdict. That clearly is the situation here, for, by the answers which the jury made to the other special interrogatories submitted, it settled every other question in the case in favor of the beneficiary.
On the- entire situation, we think a retrial is properly and justly required. The petition for rehearing is accordingly denied.