Court Opinion

ID: 9588293
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:32:31.232798+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:49.754911
License: Public Domain

On Motion tor Rehearing.
It is contended in the motion for a rehearing that the failure to produce the insurance policy “presumptively resulted in the selection of disqualified jurors.” Were this true, it would be, in our opinion, an error entering into the rendition of the verdict which would require the grant of a new trial. Whether or not the refusal of a motion to purge the jury, however, should be assigned as error in the bill of exceptions or in the motion for a new trial is not decided by Atlanta Coach Co. v. Cobb, 178 Ga. 544, supra, since in that case both forms of assignment of error were included, presumably from an abundance of caution.
The distinction is that in the Cobb case the court refused to purge the jury as to stockholders and employees of the insurance carrier, whereas in this case there is no contention in the motion for a new trial that the court did not thus purge the jury. The insurance policy was presumably in the courtroom and available to the trial judge in compliance with a pretrial order to that effect, and, had counsel contended at the time that the jury was or might have been purged as to the wrong company because of misinformation by the defendant or his counsel, the trial judge could have settled the matter at that time. Counsel raised no such question, merely contending he had a right to examine personally the contents of the policy because of his previous motion to produce, and that “the statement in the pretrial order that the jury was to be qualified as to Liberty Mutual Insurance Company was not sufficient to comply with the law.” This being so, the statement in the motion for rehearing that failure to allow counsel to examine the policy “presumptively resulted in *817the selection of disqualified jurors” is not supported by the record.

Motion denied.