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20 Mich. 338

Comstock v. Smith

Michigan Supreme Court

Decided May 10, 1870

Michigan Supreme Court · decided 1870-05-10

This case came into the Circuit Court for the County of Lenawee, by appeal from the disallowance by commissioners, appointed by the Probate Court of that county, of a claim presented by Medora E. Smith, against the estate of Addison J. Comstock, deceased, arising upon a mortgage executed by the deceased and Darius C. Jackson, on the 25th day of January, 1866, then of the village of Oil Springs, in the Province of Canada, conditioned for the payment “ of two thousand dollars…

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1870-05-10

How this case has been cited

Cited by 11 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 1931

10 state decisions

401870188018901900191019201930decided

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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Cheistiancy, J.

¶1I concur fully in the opinion of my brother Graves, except so far as relates to the testimony which the plaintiff below was allowed to give against defendant’s objections, to show what the well was represented to her to produce at the time she purchased from DeCau, what it had produced when previously owned by DeCau, and what she paid when she purchased it.

¶2The defendant defended on the ground that his intestate had been induced to make the purchase, and to give the mortgage (upon which the action was brought), by the false and fraudulent representations of the plaintiff’s agent, (her husband), that the well was a five-barrel well, and was then producing five barrels of oil per day, when in fact it did not produce over about one-fourth of that quantity.

¶3The evidence tended to show that such was the repre*349sentation of her agent, who was at the place in charge of the well, and well acquainted with its real production; that this representation was a chief inducement to the intestate to make the purchase, and that he did make the purchase, relying upon its truth.

¶4The evidence also tended to show that the representation was false, that the well did not produce more than one-fourth the amount respresented, and that her agent knew it.

¶5It was, I think, no answer to such a defense, and did not tend to answer it, to show that the well had, at some former period, when owned by DeCau, produced this amount, nor to show what the plaintiff below had given for it when she purchased it, nor what it had been represented to her to produce when she purchased. If she had been defrauded by DeCau, it was no justification or excuse for her to defraud the deceased by the like or any other means, in selling to him.

¶6All such evidence was, it seems to me, wholly inadmissible, and calculated to mislead the jury, to the prejudice of the defendant. On this ground alone I think the judgment should be reversed and a new trial awarded.

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