Dupee v. Lentine

Decided November 15, 1888

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · decided 1888-11-15

Tort for an assault and battery. At the trial in the Superior Court, before Mason, J., the defendant admitted that he committed the assault, on May 12, 1887, at seven o’clock P. M., by striking the plaintiff, and then offered to show that in his absence his wife had been indecently insulted by the plaintiff at four o’clock P. m. on the same day, and that he had been informed of that, fact only ten minutes before the assault, which occurred when he met the plaintiff for the…

Relies on Tyson v. Booth

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1888-11-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently July 1940

3 state decisions

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.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Bv the Court.

¶1It is the settled rule in this Commonwealth, that, in an action for an assault and battery, previous provocation is not admissible in mitigation of damages. Provocation cannot be shown, unless it is so recent and immediate as to form part of the transaction. In other words, to be admissible, it must be provocation happening at the time of the assault. Mowry v. Smith, 9 Allen, 67. Tyson v. Booth, 100 Mass. 258. Bonino v. Caledonio, 144 Mass, 299.

¶2In the case at bar the court therefore rightly rejected the evidence offered by the defendant to show provocation by the *581previous act of the plaintiff in insulting the defendant’s wife. It was not a provocation occurring at the time of the assault, and formed no part of the transaction.

¶3Exceptions overruled.