Court Opinion

ID: 9643155
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 20:20:55.903182+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:57.035778
License: Public Domain

CHARLES E. CLARK, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the result).
I am distressed by the statement in the opinion that the excluded evidence was clearly incompetent and that it would have been error to admit it, for to my way of thinking it clearly should have been admitted — indeed, tliat the court’s act was of that type of harsh exclusionary ruling which we have found so troublesome recently. Commercial Banking Corp. v. Martel, 2 Cir., Dec. 1, 1941, 123 F.2d 846; United States v. White, 2 Cir., Dec. 1, 1941, 124 F.2d 181. And the statement runs counter to our admonition in United States v. White that “admission seldom does any harm, while exclusion often proves extremely embarrassing in sustaining a judgment fundamentally just.” The authority cited in its support does no more than beg the question so far as our present situation is concerned, for that case merely says — with reference to quite different facts —that the rule that when a part of a writing is given in evidence by one party, the whole on the same subject may be given in evidence by the other is subject to the limitation that no more of the remainder of the writing than concerns the same subject and is explanatory of the portion admitted is receivable in evidence. The question for us is which applies, the main rule or the limitation — and this, of course, leaves considerable freedom of choice, as the various examples collected in 7 Wig-more on Evidence, 3d Ed.1940, § 2113, show. My brothers, I suggest, sacrifice the rule to expand the limitation.
Here the driver, after marking a not very apt printed diagram (and marking it to show the place of collision seemingly before the curve of the diagram), added his practical explanation of the occurrence; it is harsh, indeed, to separate that explanation into small component parts of two words each, of which one is receivable and the rest are to be rejected. The diagram he had marked did show the path of *320the other car north to south, and it seems to me he was clearly entitled to show that the road was wet and down grade, as he here explains. Actually we do not get a fair and honest picture of the state of the driver’s mind at the time unless we accept the ambiguous drawing only with his direct explanation which accompanied it. The plaintiff should take the statement cum onere; she should not have her cake and eat it, too. Further, as a practical matter, the plaintiff would have undue advantage from the semiofficial nature of the document if the defendant is restricted to cutting out and offering two words only of it, as though the rest were poisonous. Finally there is no way here that the defendant might have guessed at the anomaly of the two admissible words out of the whole sentence; for the peremptory ruling sustaining the objection “self-serving” to the entire statement gave no hint of such a result. Under the circumstances it would have been hardy counsel, indeed, who thereafter would have tried to get the document in piecemeal. The whole episode, I believe, was not within the spirit of) modern trials and the wide rule of admissibility stated in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, rule 43(a), 28 U.S.C.A. following section 723c.
How much effect this may have had on the trial is, as usual, difficult to conjecture. But since the whole matter was thoroughly tried out and the driver testified in full, I am willing with some hesitation to treat it as an error, which under F. R. C. P. rule 61 we should overlook.