Traders & General Ins. Co. v. Collins

179 S.W.2d 525, 1944 Tex. App. LEXIS 663
CourtCourt of Appeals of Texas
DecidedMarch 30, 1944
DocketNo. 11621.
StatusPublished
Cited by28 cases

This text of 179 S.W.2d 525 (Traders & General Ins. Co. v. Collins) 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
Traders & General Ins. Co. v. Collins, 179 S.W.2d 525, 1944 Tex. App. LEXIS 663 (Tex. Ct. App. 1944).

Opinion

*527 GRAVES, Justice.

This appeal, in a compensation case, arising from the claimed injuries appellee received on June 12 of 1942 from the falling upon him of the gasoline truck he was then driving for his employer, is from a judgment, in appellee’s favor against appellant, of the 80th District Court of Harris County, sitting with a jury, entered in part upon the jury’s verdict in response to special issues submitted, and in part upon independent findings of the court itself from the evidence, in material substance as follows; to-wit:

“For total permanent incapacity at a compensation rate of $20.00 per week for the period of 401 weeks from the daté of the injury, less a credit of $249.30, heretofore paid to plaintiff by the defendant in weekly benefits, and further providing that the matured payments, less said credit, now amounting to $1,184.84, should be paid by the defendants to the plaintiff, and that in addition thereto the defendant should pay to the plaintiff the sum of $6,-631.43 in weekly installments of $20 per week, the first installment becoming due •on October 18, 1943, and should run for a period of 331 weeks and four days from the date of the entry of this decree.”

The cause had been taken by the appel-lee to the court below, on April 27, of 1943, in protest against a previous award made to him by the Industrial Accident Board, which he had been unwilling to accept—his pleadings and these consequent special-issues having plainly raised the fact-questions, upon which,the quoted findings of court and jury of total and permanent disability were based.

Appellant neither objected nor excepted during the trial to the sufficiency of either these pleadings or issues. Hence it may not do so on appeal. Rule 274, Texas Rules of Civil Procedure; Galveston Theatres v. Larsen, Tex.Civ.App., 124 S.W.2d 936.

In inveighing here against such action of the trial court, appellant relies upon seven stated points-of-error, which may 'be summarized in this way:

(1) The alleged error of the court in ■permitting Dr. J. E. Bell to testify, over .appellant’s objection, first, as to his conversation over the telephone with Dr. Tucker, relating to the destruction of X-:ray pictures of the appellee taken by Dr. Bell prior to the institution of this suit, on the ground that it was hearsay; second, in further permitting Dr. Bell to testify as to what such X-ray pictures had revealed, the pictures themselves not having been produced nor introduced in evidence on this trial.-
(2) The finding in both the verdict and the judgment that appellee sustained total' and permanent incapacity as the result of his alleged injuries is contrary to the great preponderance of the evidence, is not supported by the pleadings or the evidence, and is manifestly wrong.
(3) The finding in both the verdict and the judgment holding the appellant liable to the appellee for a wage-rate fixed under subsection 3, section 1, Article 8309, Vernon’s Texas Civil Statutes, as being just and fair to both parties, was manifestly wrong and' contrary to the great weight and preponderance of the evidence, in that ’ there was no sufficient evidence to support the jury’s finding that there was no other employee of appellee’s class who had worked the whole of the preceding year. ■ ‘
(4) The court reversibly erred “In permitting the jury to change their verdict and answers to Special Issues Nos. 6, 7,- 8, 11, 12 and 13, after such verdict had been received and accepted by the Court as asealed verdict, and in orally instructing' the jury, without appellant’s consent, and in response to questions of' the' foreman, that the jury would have the right to change their answers to questions other-than those which the Court, by written instructions, had advised the jury were in conflict, and that they would have ■ the right to change their answers to as many of the questions as they, might desire.”
(5) The court erred in permitting ap-pellee’s counsel in his opening argument to the jury, over appellant’s objections made at the time, to engage in improper argument to the jury, that was prejudicial to the appellant’s cause.

After painstaking consideration of the record, the briefs, and oral arguments of counsel for both sides, it is concluded that none of appellant’s points for a reversal should be sustained.

When reduced to its ultimate, the two-pronged objection to the testimony of Dr. Bell, relating to the X-ray pictures he had taken of the appellee following his injury and before this trial, gets down to the one legal question presented here, of *528 whether or not there was laid a sufficient predicate for the admission of, first, Dr. Bell’s objected-to testimony as secondary proof of what the X-ray pictures revealed as to the appellee’s condition, and, second, of Dr. Tucker’s statement over the telephone to Dr. Bell that he had destroyed such X-ray pictures^along with other things left by Dr. Bell in his Liberty office • — when Dr. Tucker succeeded him there.

Appellant insists that no such predicate was properly laid in this instance, in that a fair appraisal of Dr. Bell’s testimony shows that he did not know whether the X-rays he had so taken and left in his office at Liberty, Texas, had been lost or destroyed; but that he had merely assumed, from the hearsay statement of Dr. Tucker to him of the latter’s having destroyed all left-over papers in that office when he took the same over from Dr. Bell, that they had been destroyed; that Dr. Bell’s conversation over the long-distance telephone, in which Dr. Tucker had said that he also destroyed the X-ray pictures, was purely hearsay, inadmissible, and did not establish the loss or destruction of these X-rays.

That contention, however, loses much of its force, it is thought, when these circumstances inhering in the incident are considered: On December 16, 1942, Dr. Bell, at the request of appellant, examined the appellee, took the X-ray pictures of him, and made a report to it of his -findings thereon; on September 1, 1943, thereafter, Dr. Bell left Liberty, where he had long practiced medicine, and moved his office to Houston, taking there with him all his X-ray files covering the period of six months next preceding his, departure from Liberty; he carefully searched these files at Houston and did not find the Collins X-rays, he having 'left all his films that were thus (as these were) more than six months old in his old office at Liberty, where Dr. Tucker meanwhile had succeeded him; Dr. Bell further testified that he had had occasion to look for these films also there at Liberty, and that he had not been able to find them, but did find that they had been removed from his old office, he saying he found out they had been destroyed; when he so left Liberty he sold his clinic to Dr. Tucker, and when he was requested to bring these films to Houston to testify upon this trial he inquired of Dr. Tucker, as the last custodian thereof, as to what disposition the latter had made of Dr. Bell’s abandoned films at Liberty, and was informed that Dr. Tucker had destroyed them, along with other things found in the Liberty office when he took it over.

It accordingly seems clear that the ap-pellee, before offering the testimony of Dr.

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179 S.W.2d 525, 1944 Tex. App. LEXIS 663, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/traders-general-ins-co-v-collins-texapp-1944.