Court Opinion

ID: 9712305
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 04:51:09.503789+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:11.428630
License: Public Domain

Hammond, J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion:
One usually gets in this life only what he pays for. Insurance coverage is no exception. The decision in this case, it seems to me, gives the policyholder-appellees extended coverage at no extra premium.
At the threshold we meet the anomaly that the plaintiffs below, the appellees here, were permitted to go to the jury although they produced witnesses who testified that their theory of the case was wrong. The police officer, called by them, said flatly the safe had not been opened by force and violence and that the superficial marks on it did not permit the inference that it had been. Lieutenant Smith, in charge of the investigation, testified that the official police report was accurate in stating that the safe showed “no signs of forced entry on the outside door”. He continued: “If any of the marks I have testified to, if they have proved, upon checking the door, that the safe was not intact, the safe was broken, that would lead to my belief that those marks did open the safe. But, according to our investigation, the same was still intact properly so. We did not say that the door was actually opened by those marks in the criminal investigation.”
The function of a jury is to determine the facts from conflicting evidence, but a plaintiff does not meet his burden of proof and may not prevail, as a matter of law, if he offers the jury a choice of two versions of the case, one of which makes the defendant liable and the other of which exonerates him.
*178The opinion of the majority says there was evidence, or permissible inferences from evidence, from which an “ordinary intelligent mind” could conclude that force or violence effected the entry into the safe. It finds this from one or two answers of witnesses, isolated from context and changed in meaning. The opinion' summarizes the evidence it feels was sufficient to go to the jury as follows: “The knob had been pulled and wrenched by a Stillson wrench. The dial on the combination had been struck several times with a hammer. Hammering has some effect on a safe lock. The safe was made only to withstand certain attempts at burglary.” It concludes that the jury could find that “The marks made by a chisel, a Stillson wrench and a ball-peen hammer aided the unlawful expert manipulation of the combination of the safe and were the means by which it was opened * * *.”
Actually, there is not one word of testimony in the record that a wrench, Stillson or otherwise, was used on the safe. Lieutenant Smith plainly was merely likening the ridges or indentations on the knob that turns the combination to the gripping surface of a Stillson wrench, and nothing more. All he did was to compare the appearance of several of the ridges to the worn inner surface of a used Stillson wrench, never suggesting that such a wrench or any other wrench had been used. The argument that hammering must have had some effect on the lock is derived from one answer, on cross-examination, of Moller, the expert on safes, who testified for the defendants. He said he would only use a hammer if he were repairing a defective combination. If a case is to go to the jury on inference from testimony of a defense witness, the fair import of all his immediate testimony on the point must be considered. The transcript shows that this was the immediate and pertinent colloquy between Moller and counsel for appellees: “Q. As an expert of forty years standing, if a safe is locked and if a man were expert in opening a safe, wouldn’t he use a hammer or wrench to open the doors? A. No. Q. What would he use a hammer for? A. The only way he would *179use a hammer if the lock wasn’t in good working order.” Not only did this expert say positively, without challenge, that a hammer would not open or help to open the safe in the case at bar, but another witness, Kabernagle, manager of the Mosler Safe Company who manufactured and sold the safe, testified without contradiction that there were no marks of any kind on the outside door indicating entrance had been made with force or violence, and that the safe could withstand attack by ordinary tools for twenty minutes before it could be totally damaged so that it could be entered, and that the only way it could be entered would be by completely knocking off the combination in the front and bending the back of the safe through to entirely release the locking bolts from the safe.
The jury was entirely free to disbelieve both Mr. Moller and Mr. Kabernagle if there were affirmative testimony to the contrary permitting them to form an opinion that rose above speculation. The cases referred to in the majority opinion, in which recovery has been permitted, contain either expert opinion evidence that the safe in question could have been opened by a combination of force and manipulation or evidence that the combination or the locking bolts, or both, showed physical evidence of the application of force sufficient to open the safe. Generally, the locking mechanism of the safe, after the incident that gave rise to the litigation, either did not work at all or very faultily or the safe could be opened in a way it formerly could not have been. In the case before us, the safe worked just as well after the robbery as before. There was no physical change in the bolts or the combination.
If we assume for the argument, that under the language of the policy force and violence need be only a contributing means in the opening of the safe — this interpretation could go as far as to include a tap of the combination dial as part of manipulation — the one answer of Moller that he would use a hammer only when a lock was broken, cannot be tortured on the rack to stretch into evidence that a hammer played any part in the opening *180of the safe in this case. Moller’s statement, in context, clearly meant that he would use the hammer to break the lock or to repair it after the safe was open. The statement in the opinion that “hammering has some effect on a safe lock” is deduced from the same one sentence of Moller. As a generalization, the quoted statement cannot be challenged. Hammering has some effect on almost anything hammered but nowhere in this case is there any evidence that hammering had any effect in opening the safe, either alone or as part of expert manipulation. Indeed, there was no evidence that there had been manipulation. The jury was permitted to speculate as to how the safe had been opened.
If we were permitted to speculate as the jury was, several theories come to mind as to how the safe was opened. It may not have been locked the night before even though it was thought to have been by one of the appellees. Some safes can be seemingly locked with a small turn of the combination dial and released by turning it back the same distance. While the combination dial is so turned, the handle, if pulled, gives the impression of complete locking. The robbers may have discovered that the safe was unlocked after superficial and futile efforts to open it by force and violence. It is said that Houdini, the escape artist, took far longer to escape from a cell that had been deliberately left unlocked to fool him, than he ever did from a locked cell. The safe may have been opened by the combination, although the appellees say that no one knew it but themselves. It is possible that the combination may have been learned in some manner by an employee or someone else. The safe may have been opened by manipulation alone. If done that way or by use of the known combination, whomsoever did it may have wished to cover up the tracks and make it look like a crime of violence so as to throw the police off the trail. As a basis of decision all such speculations are denied us, just as they should have been denied the jury. I think the record clearly requires the judgment to be reversed.
Chief Judge Bruñe has authorized me to say that he concurs in the views herein expressed.