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23 Mo. 38

Gamache v. Grimm

Supreme Court of Missouri

Decided March 15, 1856

Supreme Court of Missouri · decided 1856-03-15

^Appeal from St. Louis Circuit Court. This was an action on a promissory note for $535. The consideration of the note was the erection of a house by plaintiff for defendant. The defendant set up in his anwer a failure of tbe consideration of tbe note, in tbis, that tbe house constructed by plaintiff for defendant, bad, from tbe use of inferior materials, and tbe unworkmanlike manner in which it bad been constructed, fallen down and become utterly worthless.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1856-03-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently November 1914

5 state decisions

201856186018701880189019001910decided

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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Scott, Judge,

¶1delivered the opinion of tlie court.

¶2Under the answer set up by the defendants, it was competent for them to show in evidence a partial.failure of consideration. The instruction (numbered 6), given by the court, seems to inculcate the idea, that, unless there was a total failure of consideration, there must necessarily be a verdict for the plaintiff for the amount of his demand; and that the defendants were not entitled to any deduction by reason of any loss or injury they may have sustained in consequence of the unskillful manner in which the work was executed, unless it turned out that the work to them was totally worthless. In this we are of opinion, that the court erred. The pleadings and the evidence warranted the second instruction asked by the defendants, and it should have been given.

¶3As the real sum due was $500, and the interest on it for six months, by the contract, was thirty-five dollars, it follows that twenty dollars was the excess of usurious interest, which, being deducted from the sum really due (five hundred dollars), would leave the sum of four hundred and eighty dollars to which the plaintiff would be entitled, were there no other considerations in the case.

¶4The other judges concurring, the judgment will be reversed, and the cause remanded.

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