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49 Ill. 253

Wilder v. Greenlee

Illinois Supreme Court

Decided September 15, 1868

Illinois Supreme Court · decided 1868-09-15

S. B. Gookins presiding as Judge, by agreement of parties. This was an action of replevin, brought by William Wilder against Bobert L. Greenlee and others, to recover a portable steam engine, The defendants pleaded property in James Baxter.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1868-09-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently June 1927

5 state decisions

201868187018801890190019101920decided

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:

¶2The only question in this case is, whether the engine which was replevied was the same enginewhich had been fraudulently obtained from the possession of the plaintiff’s bailee, under the false pretext that the person thus obtaining it had bought it from the plaintiff. While the evidence upon this point is contradictory, it has led us to a different conclusion from that reached by the learned counsel who, by consent of parties, tried this case in the superior court. As, however, it is not the practice of this court to reverse a judgment where the evidence is contradictory, merely because our own examination inclines us to a different view of it from that taken by the court below, we should probably refrain from doing so in this case, if the newly discovered evidence presented in the affidavits submitted on the motion for a new trial did not strengthen our conviction that the ends of justice require a further examination of this case.

¶3As there is to be another trial, we forbear from any discussion of the evidence, only remarking that the case is a peculiar one, and the witnesses on one side or the other have clearly sworn to what is not true, and the newly discovered testimony is not cumulative in regard to the .particular point to which it relates, nor could its importance have been foreseen by the plaintiff.

¶4A careful examination of the entire record, has left us with a firm conviction that there should be an opportunity given for a further investigation.

¶5The judgment is reversed and the cause remanded.

¶6Judgment reversed.

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