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111 Mass. 63

Morrissey v. Ingham

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court

Decided November 15, 1872

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1872-11-15

Tout. The declaration alleged that the defendant, “with force and arms, debauched and carnally knew the plaintiff by force and against her will, and then gave her a loathsome and contagious disease.” Trial in the Superior Court, before Wilkinson, J., who, after a verdict for the defendant, allowed the following bill of exceptions: “ The plaintiff introduced evidence tending to prove the assault set forth in her declaration made upon her about November 1, 1867, and that she…

Relies on Harrington v. Harrington

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1872-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently November 1967

8 state decisions

301872188018901900191019201930194019501960decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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By rmii Court.

¶1The plaintiff fails to sustain the burden resting upon her as the excepting party as to any of the exceptions taken at the trial.

¶21. The plaintiff’s offer to prove by her attending physician her statements to him was rightly rejected, because it included a statement that the defendant was the person who had had intercourse with her, which could not affect the nature of her disease or the physician’s understanding thereof, and the physician’s testimony to which would be mere hearsay evidence, directly tending to prejudice the defendant.

¶32. The testimony of the defendant’s family physician, though negative in character, yet not being shown by the bill of exceptions to be too remote in point of time, might lawfully be admitted in answer to the evidence previously introduced and relied on by the plaintiff.

¶43. The bill of exceptions not showing what the matters were to which the defendant’s wife had testified in his favor, and showing that no evidence had been offered of an attempt to procure a warrant against the defendant, and the strong bias and prejudice of the witness being admitted, it does not appear that the exclusion of the question put to her on cross-examination was beyond the legal exercise of the discretion of the presiding judge. Commonwealth v. Shaw, 4 Cush. 593. Parmenter v Coburn, 6 Gray, 509.

¶5*674. The evidence that the defendant some months before had slept one night in a house of ill fame might properly be excluded as immaterial.

¶65. The statement by the presiding judge in the instructions to the jury of what had been said of the nature of the action does not appear to have been justly open to exception as charging them in respect to matters of fact in violation of the Gen. Sts. c. 115, § 5. Harrington v. Harrington, 107 Mass. 329.

¶7Exceptions overruled.

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