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44 Ill. 355

Small v. Brainard

Illinois Supreme Court

Decided April 15, 1867

Illinois Supreme Court · decided 1867-04-15

Charles R. Starr, Judge, presiding. This was an action of trespass brought in the court below by Cyrus Brainard, against Abram L. Small, and a trial resulted in a verdict and judgment for the plaintiff. The defendant thereupon appealed to this court.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1867-04-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 3 later decisions — most recently January 1952

3 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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Mr. Justice Lawrence

¶1delivered the opinion of the Court:

¶2This was an action of trespass brought for digging a ditch and causing the water to overflow upon the plaintiff’s land. The defendant pleaded not guilty and several special pleas. On the trial the court gave for the plaintiff the' following instruction:

“ The court instructs the jury for plaintiff, that he is entitled to recover in this action all damages proved to have heen sustained by him on account of the trespasses committed by defendant on plaintiff’s premises, as alleged in the declaration in this cause.”

¶3The appellant objects to this instruction, that it assumes the defendant committed the trespasses, and that the only question before the jury was the amount of damages. The objection is well taken, and we cannot say, on an examination of the entire record, that the jury were not misled. We are the more inclined to reverse the judgment on account of this instruction, because we do not find in the evidence a very good basis for the estimate of the damages, $150, found by the jury. Witnesses give it as their opinion that the plaintiff’s land was injured to that extent, but they do not state wherein the injury to that degree consists, nor the facts upon which their opinion is founded. The judgment is reversed and the cause remanded.

¶4Judgment reversed.

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