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42 Mo. App. 428

Christopher v. White

Missouri Court of Appeals

Decided December 1, 1890

Missouri Court of Appeals · decided 1890-12-01

— Hon. Ciiás. W. Sloan, Judge. (1) The question to be determined by this court is as to whether there was any issue of fact involved in the trial below. Appellant claims that there was, and that the court below erred in instructing the jury to find for plaintiff. (2) The court erred when the jury brought in their verdict, by ordering the verdict to be changed from a verdict in favor of defendant to a verdict in favor of plaintiff.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Affirmed · Decided 1890-12-01

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently November 1961

4 state decisions

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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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Ellison, J.

¶1This is an action for rent alleged to be due plaintiff on a lease executed by him to defend’ant. The circuit court gave a peremptory instruction that the jury should find for plaintiff, and defendant appeals.

¶2When the complaint made to the action of the trial court is that the evidence did not justify a peremptory instruction, or, in other words, that the testimony was sufficiently contradictory as to justify its submission to the jury, it is quite apparent that such testimony should be set out in full in the appellant’s abstract, so that we may be enabled to pass upon the justness of the complaint. This court and the supreme court have frequently so ruled. Here, appellant’s version of the evidence is set out, and not the whole evidence itself, and so we will assume the court acted properly on the instruction, as we have no proper means of saying to the contrary. We may remark', however, that, from what does appear in the abstract, it would seem that the court’s action was justifiable from the defendant’s testimony in his own behalf.

¶3IL When the jury returned their verdict under the instruction of the court, it read as a finding of two hundred dollars for the defendant, instead of plaintiff. The trial court thereupon ordered them to change it to read “plaintiff,” which they did. We think no error was committed in this respect. The verdict under instruction should have been for plaintiff; and, in the absence of any protest or objection from the jury to the change, we will assume what was unquestionably the fact, that the word “defendant” was inadvertently written in the verdict when “plaintiff” was meant.

¶4The judgment is affirmed.

All concur.
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