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114 Wis. 270

Wegner v. Risch

Wisconsin Supreme Court

Decided April 22, 1902

Wisconsin Supreme Court · decided 1902-04-22

<p> False imprisonment: Nominal damages. </p> <p>Upon testimony tending to show that although technically the defendant, a policeman, had unlawfully deprived plaintiff of her liberty, yet that he had arrested her because he believed her insane and in need of care for her own safety; that she suffered no indignity other than transportation in the patrol wagon to the station house; and that before the arrest she was momentarily exposing herself on the streets to a far higher degree of notoriety and disgrace, — it is held that there was no abuse of discretion in refusing to set aside as inadequate a verdict for nominal damages.</p>

Cited by 1 later decisions — most recently October 1941

1 federal appellate ·

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Affirmed · Decided 1902-04-22

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Dodge, J.

¶1After careful examination of the record, we feel constrained to the conclusion that the trial court was -guilty of no abuse of his discretion in refusing to set aside the verdict on the plaintiff’s motion. Conceding, as perhaps the evidence establishes without controversy, that there was *272technically an unlawful arrest, in that the plaintiff was committing neither any crime nor a breach of the peace, yet the defendant’s testimony that he arrested her because he believed her insane and in need of care for her own safety is of course sufficient to support such view of his conduct by the jury. In the absence of any violence and of any indignities other than the mere peaceful and orderly transportation of the defendant to a place of safety, when she was momentarily exposing herself to a far higher degree of notoriety and disgrace, although technically an unlawful deprivation of her liberty, we cannot say that the jury acted wholly outside of their proper province in finding only nominal damages. The rules of law which place that question more than all others in the hands of a jury are too trite to need more than suggested reference. Henderson v. McReynolds, 38 N. Y. St. 734, 14 N. Y. Supp. 351, and Bradlaugh v. Edwards, 11 C. B. (N. S.) 377, present extreme illustrations of cases in which courts have declined to set aside verdicts for nominal damages. In this case the spoken evidence was, of course, much supplemented to the jury and the trial court by the personal appearance both of the plaintiff and defendant; and that court having, in its discretion and with these advantages, approved the jury’s action, we cannot, in the light of any information contained in the record, overrule his conclusion, whether as an original question we might or might not have reached the same conclusion.

¶2By the Gowrt. — Judgment affirmed.

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