Freeman v. Wilkes-Barre & Wyoming Valley Traction Co.

Citations

• 36 Pa. Super. 166
• 1908 Pa. Super. LEXIS 128

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Street railways — Improper remarks of counsel — Withdrawal of juror and continuance — Trial—Practice, C. P.</p> <p>Where, in a negligence case against a street railway company, counsel for the plaintiff in his address to the jury injects his personal experience as a standard of measurement of the conduct of the company’s agent, uses language which is equivalent to the statement of a fact not proved, and appeals' to the prejudice and sympathy of the jury by reference to the poverty of the plaintiff, a juror should be withdrawn and the case continued.</p> <p>Such action should be taken by the court where the plaintiff’s attorney uses language as follows: “The doctor in charge of staff would have taken R. (agent for defendant) by the neck and kicked him out. According to R’s story, if he had any decency or was even human, he would not have done- business with the plaintiff at the hospital. The conduct of this agent was the most brutal and inhuman in my experience. They (doctors, naming them) are excrescences, a disgrace to the profession they belong to. Of course if we had the fees for doctors we could have brought them into court and shown that plaintiff is so bad that he cannot now even hold the lines of his horses.”</p>