Court Opinion

ID: 9827899
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 17:55:06.2235+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:42:38.717774
License: Public Domain

*101ON REHEARING.
The twenty-fourth assignment of error in appellant’s brief complains of the following language used by counsel for appellees in the closing address to the jury:
“Gentlemen of the Jury: The State of Texas has conferred her sovereign rights upon this quasi-public corporation (meaning the plaintiff), and authorized it to take your land without your consent, even to the taking of your homestead, and use it for its right of way, and by this authority and power enables it to peon all of the lands under its canals for a period of fifty years, and to get a revenue from this land without the payment of one dollar of the taxes on the land value, and no other canal company or man can go into this territory and water one acre of land, because this company has the control of such land, because it is not to the interest or valuable to any other canal or person to parallel plaintiff’s canal or divide its territory, and they therefore control the lands planted to rice under it.”
In passing upon this assignment we held that the language did not appear to us to go beyond the limits of fair argument. It was our conclusion that this was true in a discussion before the jury of the issue of the unreasonableness of certain stipulations in the contract. In this we think we were in error. It was a matter of law for the court to decide, whether the unreasonableness of those stipulations could be urged as a defense by appellees. Having determined that this issue should be submitted to the jury, in determining that issue it was not material that the one party to the contract was a quasi-public corporation with the power of eminent domain. That could not affect the question as to whether the stipulations in the contract were unreasonable, but only the law question as to whether, if unreasonable, they should be enforced. In this view no proper argument could be made to the jury that appellant had the power to condemn and take away the farms of the jurors, for the purposes of the canal, and “peon” all the lands lying along the canal. Such argument could only have, the effect of inflaming the minds of the jurors against appellant and arousing prejudieie against it to the obscuration of the real issues.
In the case of Gulf, C. & S. F. Ry. v. Scott, (26 S. W., 999), the judgment was reversed solely on account of language in no degree more objectionable than that used in the present case. (See also Galveston, H. & H. Ry. v. Cooper, 70 Texas, 67; Texas & St. L. Ry. v. Jarrell, 60 Texas, 267; Willis v. McNeill, 57 Texas, 473; Gulf, C. & S. F. Ry. v. Jones, 73 Texas, 236.)
When the objectionable argument was made, counsel of appellant objected and asked that counsel making the argument be restrained and that the jury be instructed to disregard the statements made. The court refused to do either. The effect of this upon the jury could only be to create the impression that the facts stated in the argument referred to were ^ proper for their consideration in determining the issues submitted to them. The evidence was sharply conflicting, especially upon the issue as the amount of appellee’s damages, *102and it is very probable that the verdict was influenced to some extent by the improper argument.
That the trial judge refuses to restrain counsel renders it only the more necessary that they restrain themselves.
The judgment is reversed and the cause remanded for a new trial.

Reversed and remanded.