Court Opinion

ID: 9771903
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 16:59:30.153381+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:31:39.510482
License: Public Domain

George Rose Smith, Justice, concurning. I join in the majority opinion, but I think it appropriate to add a few words of separate concurrence to call attention to an assumption made in the dissenting opinion which I think to involve a misconception of the practice that we follow in remanding a case for a new trial. The keystone of the minority opinion in this case is the assertion that the appellant should escape the rule of the law of the case because counsel could not have successfully urged their present contention on the first appeal. This is the pivotal language in the dissenting opinion: I would agree that when the record was such that the partjr against whom the rule [of the law of the case] is invoked could have argued the point on the first appeal, he should be foreclosed from arguing it on a second appeal. But that is not the case here. Appellants could not have argued the point on their first appeal. We would have rejected their argument had they done so, because the question would have been raised for the first time on appeal. When we are affirming a ease we customarily reject arguments that are vulnerable to technical procedural defects, such as a failure to make the proper objection in the trial court, a failure to include in the motion for a new trial an objection in a criminal case, a failure by the trial judge to give a requested instruction that was imperfectly drawn, a failure to save an exception in a criminal case, and a host of other procedural defects that must ordinarily be given effect in the orderly conduct of litigation. When, however, we have already found reversible error and are remanding the case for a new trial, the situation is wholly different — quite as much so as night from day. It is then our practice — and rightly so — to consider on its merits any contention that may arise again when the case is retried, regardless of procedural defects that would otherwise compel us to reject the contention. The only requirement is that the point be brought to our attention in the briefs (which was not done on the first appeal in Mode v. State, relied upon by the minority opinion in the case at bar). Our practice in this respect is so well settled that examples could be found in any volume of our Reports published during the past quarter century or so. I will cite only our unanimous opinion in Arkansas State Highway Commn. v. Ark. Real Estate Co., 243 Ark. 738, 421 S.W. 2d 882 (1967), because there we considered on the merit not one but two contentions that were procedurally defective. One, we held that upon a new trial the appellant would be entitled to a certain instruction, even though the one offered at the first trial was properly rejected because it ivas imperfectly drawn. Two, we pointed out that one of the appellant’s contentions might be unsound upon a second trial, even though we could not tell from the appellant’s abstract on the first appeal whether the trial court had erred at the original trial. Our practice is demonstrably right. It involves no unfairness ¡either to the trial court or to the losing party, because the case is going back for a new trial in any event. Hence what we fry to do is to prevent still a third trial as a result of some error that is called to our attention upon the first appeal. The view of the dissenting opinion, on the other hand, would encourage such unnecessary third trials by requiring us to reject, on procedural grounds, contentions that ought to be disposed of on their merits upon the first appeal. Indeed, the present case illustrates my point. The minority opinion is in error, I think, in its concluding observation: “In this ease it should be less difficult to recognize the ¡error urged by appellants because we would not be faced with the bugaboo of a third trial. We simply could reduce the judgment by the amount of the award for mental anguish.” Here the bugaboo is not that of a third trial; it is that of a second trial, as far as the point now at issue is concerned. On the first appeal the railroad company argued, though for the wrong reason, that the grandparents were not entitled to recover for mental anguish. The company could and should have presented its present argument at that time. In that way even a second trial upon the extent of the grandparents’ mental anguish (which is a question of fact under Peugh v. Oliger, 233 Ark. 281, 345 S.W. 2d 610 [1961]) would have been avoided. Thus the damage has already been done, and it is only by adhering to the doctrine of the law of the case that we can effectively prevent such wasteful and unnecessary retrials in the future.