Court Opinion

ID: 9601298
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 01:41:22.266007+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:48:56.333691
License: Public Domain

DE CONCINI, Justice
(dissenting).
I agree with Judge LA PRADE’s dissent on the point that the defendants are entitled to the right to have the jury decide *210what was the true agreement between the parties.
I am mindful of the rules laid down in Bradley v. Industrial Commission, supra, and Mutual Benefit Ass’n v. Ferrell, supra, that a person cannot avoid his written contracts by failing to read them before he signs. I do not agree with the statement in the case of In re McDonnell’s Estate, supra, that says as between a negligent person and one guilty of fraud, the negligent person shall suffer and the fraudulent person go free.
In the instant case, the majority goes one step further than the McDonnell case and compounds error so to speak. In the McDonnell case, the quitclaim deed was presented and signed by the grantor without reading it, based on false representations of one of the grantees. In this case Lane, one of the defendants, had the lease prepared and had read it before it was delivered to Mathews, lessee. It contained what he contended was the true agreement between the parties. Mathews then had it read and reread to him and, together with Mr. Putts his financial backer they concluded it did not provide as the parties agreed. They undertook to change its terms by having a page rewritten with the same date and with the same dictator’s and stenographer’s initials placed thereon as were on the original lease, and then delivered the same to Lane without advising- him of the change.
Such action strikes me as inequitable conduct on the part o-f Mathews. The majority opinion extends the rule in the McDonnell case to the extent that the -burden was not only on Lane to read the lease, but also to reread the lease after it was returned to him in what was purportedly the same condition (but actually it had been changed) as the original lease. Such inequitable conduct should not be condoned by a court of law. The judgment should be reversed, a new trial granted, with instructions to the trial court to ascertain what was the real agreement between the parties. Was. it as the original lease provided, as Lane contends, or as provided by the rewritten lease, as Mathews contends?
For the foregoing reasons, I dissent.