Court Opinion

ID: 9639969
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 16:53:53.892602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:23.992483
License: Public Domain

CONCURRING AND DISSENTING OPINION
FINCH, Judge.
I respectfully dissent from that portion of the majority opinion which holds that defendant waived objection to incompetency of plaintiff under § 491.010, RSMo 1959, V.A.M.S. I concur in; the other portions of the majority opinion.
Making the same assumption as the majority opinion that § 491.010 made plaintiff incompetent as a witness, I find nothing to constitute a waiver of that incompetency.
*143Defendant did not take plaintiff’s deposition or submit interrogatories to her. Neither did she at the actual trial of this case seek to offer all or any part of a transcript of testimony which plaintiff had given in the Saline County case (Schneider v. Prentzler, Mo., 391 S.W.2d 307). The only thing which defendant did was to move for summary judgment under Civil Rule 74.04, V.A.M.R. This motion was on the theory that the suit was barred under the doctrine of estoppel by judgment by reason of the verdict and judgment in the previously tried Saline County case. The entire transcript of all proceedings and evidence in the Saline County case was attached to the motion for summary judgment. That transcript included testimony given by plaintiff in that case. This, in my judgment, was not equivalent to utilizing discovery procedures and waiving the incompetency in that manner, nor was it the same as introducing in the actual trial all or part of a transcript of testimony given by the incompetent witness in a previous trial or hearing. The latter is what occurred in Lampe v. Franklin American Trust Co., 339 Mo. 361, 96 S.W.2d 710, which is cited by the majority opinion as an analogous case.
Defendant merely sought to utilize her right to ask disposition of this case on motion under Rule 74.04. In effect, she said that the trial court should look at the prior Saline County case and it would see that the doctrine of estoppel by judgment was applicable. The court, of course, had to look at the transcript in that case to determine whether to apply the doctrine of estoppel by judgment but the transcript was not used in the actual trial.
The effect of the majority opinion is to say to a party under circumstances such as that which confronted defendant that the summary judgment procedure is utilized at his peril. If a witness who testified in the previous case would be incompetent in the case at bar, and movant is not successful in urging the motion for summary judgment, then the incompetency of the witness has been waived in the process. Such a result is reminiscent of a rule which at one time prevailed in some courts that where both parties moved for a directed verdict, they thereby waived trial by jury. In my judgment, a party should not be confronted with such a Hobson’s choice in a decision whether to utilize summary judgment procedure.