Houston & Texas Central Railroad v. Ritter

41 S.W. 753, 16 Tex. Civ. App. 482, 1897 Tex. App. LEXIS 257
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedJune 29, 1897
StatusPublished
Cited by10 cases

This text of 41 S.W. 753 (Houston & Texas Central Railroad v. Ritter) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals of Texas primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Houston & Texas Central Railroad v. Ritter, 41 S.W. 753, 16 Tex. Civ. App. 482, 1897 Tex. App. LEXIS 257 (Tex. Ct. App. 1897).

Opinion

TARLTOH,

Chief Justice.—The appellee, as plaintiff, in behalf of himself recovered a verdict in the sum of $3500, and in behalf of his wife, Mrs. Eloise R. Ritter, he recovered a verdict in the sum of $2750, against the appellant, as damages for personal injuries.

The incident out of which the suit grows occurred on the night of February 28, 1896. The plaintiff and his wife were on a train of the defendant between Houston and Hempstead, when the train conductor, whose duty it ivas to take up their tickets, discovered that the one on which the plaintiff claimed to be a passenger was an invalid ticket, in that it was issued to one H. C. Rider, a person other than the plaintiff; that by its terms it was not transferable, and provided that if presented to any conductor by a person other than the original purchaser, it should from that moment be void, and. the conductor should be authorized to take up the ticket and cancel it, collecting fare from the person presenting it. The injuries to the plaintiff and to his wife are ascribed to .the violence of the conductor and of the sheriff and his deputy, called to the assistance of the conductor, in an attempt to eject the plaintiff on account of his failure to pay his fare.

We deem it our duty to reverse the judgment, for the following reasons:

1. One of the injuries alleged to have been sustained by the plaintiff’s wife consisted in a miscarriage charged to have been brought about by the violence complained of. In proof of this allegation the plaintiff was permitted, over the objection of the defendant, to read the deposition of one Mrs. Miller, that several days after the incident, and after the arrival of the appellee and his wife at Colorado Springs, where their journey terminated, the appellee’s wife told the witness Mrs. Miller that she had been with child six weeks, and had suffered a miscarriage.

We condemn this evidence, as in the nature of hearsay and of a self-serving declaration which should have been excluded. It is true that Mrs. Ritter herself testified, to-the fact of miscarriage, but it was clearly erroneous to permit her to thus duplicate her testimony by proof of an unsworn statement to a third person. Hunter v. Lanius, 82 Texas, 682. *484 The jury were thus enabled to regard the statement as original evidence, to the probable detriment of the defendant.

The declaration was not of the res gestae. Railway v. Anderson, 83 Texas, 516. It was not admissible under the rule stated in Rogers v. Crane, 30 Texas, 287, cited by the appellee, because the bodily condition did not coexist with the declaration.

The fact that this deposition read by the plaintiff was incorporated in an answer, though not responsive, to a cross-interrogatory of the defendant, would not render the statement admissible. We have recently held that the rule binding a party by evidence elicited by him on cross-examination, 'while under other circumstances it would be inadmissible, does not apply when the testimony consists in the deposition of a witness in reply to cross-interrogatories. McCutchen v. Jackson, 40 S. W. Rep., 177.

3. An element of damage relied upon in the recovery by the wife, both in the pleadings and the evidence of the plaintiff, consisted in the humiliation and mortification resulting from an exposure of her person by the conductor or his assistants, due to the removal of the curtains from the berth in which the plaintiff and his wife were lying, and from which the conductor was seeking to have the plaintiff ejected. As relevant to the question of compensation for any mental suffering which the wife might endure on account of this exposure of her person and shock to her modesty, the defendant offered evidence tending to show that in 1893 and 1894 the plaintiff’s wife conducted a disreputable house in the city of Fort Worth, and that she was a woman whose general reputation for chastity was bad; that the house in which she lived at that time was regarded in the community as a house of prostitution, and that the reputation of the plaintiff’s wife was that of a prostitute.

The question of compensation depends upon the amount of suffering which is the proximate result of the injury complained of. The suffering which would be endured by a woman modest in character and deportment, chaste and sensitive, would be much greater, we apprehend, in case of an exposure of her person, than would be that endured by a prostitute. As said by the Supreme Court of Vermont in Parker v. Coture, 21 Atlantic Reporter, 494: “It can not be said that a woman without modesty would suffer as much from an assault * * * as a woman with modesty; and if it can not be shown that the former has no modesty to shock, she is put on an equality with the latter, and may recover for injury to that which she does not possess.” We are unable to state that the time at which it was proposed to show that this reputation existed was so remote as to render the testimony inadmissible; or to hold that on account of the intervening marriage with the plaintiff reformation should be conclusively presumed to have taken place in the wife. Some of the excluded testimony went to show that at the time inquired about, the plaintiff, under a different name, that of Charley Herriman, was the paramour of his present wife.

3. The-defendant requested the following charge: “If the conductor *485 of said train requested said Ritter to leave the train or pay his fare, and if said Ritter refused to do so, then the said conductor had the right to call in to his assistance a peace officer of Waller County to assist him in ejecting said Ritter from said tram; and said officer ivas authorized and justified to use Avhatever force was necessary to accomplish that result; and if in his effort to get plaintiff from the train plaintiff’s Avife interfered and assaulted said sheriff, and struck him, Avithout any provocation or violence having been used toward her, then in such event the said sheriff, in order to prevent the infliction of further injury, had the right to use such force as Avas reasonably necessary to prevent a repetition of said violence upon her part toAvard him; and if in doing so he used no more force than was reasonably necessary to accomplish such prevention, defendant is not liable for any damage groAving out of said act.”

We think that the evidence introduced by the defendant required the submission of the issue whether the plaintiff’s Avife interfered and assaulted the sheriff without provocation, and of the consequent rights of that officer under that condition. The court’s general charge did not, in our opinion, submit such an issue to the jury.

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Bluebook (online)
41 S.W. 753, 16 Tex. Civ. App. 482, 1897 Tex. App. LEXIS 257, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/houston-texas-central-railroad-v-ritter-texapp-1897.