134 F. 828 | 3rd Cir. | 1905
It is not necessary to refer to the several specifications in this case. The three points made .in the brief for plaintiffs in error present the only questions which it is necessary to consider.
1. The action was brought to recover damages for injury alleged to have been sustained by the plaintiffs below (defendants here) by reason of their having been induced to purchase certain property from the defendants below by a false and fraudulent representation of its actual production of petroleum oil, and “that the pipe-line statements of the runs of oil from said property showed the correctness of the aforesaid representation.” This is a brief, but, for the present purpose, a sufficient, abstract of the plaintiffs’ allegation of their cause of action; and that evidence of what the pipe-line statements did show was directly pertinent to the issue joined upon that allegation seems to us to be obvious. But if the only legitimate subject of inquiry had been as to the quantity of oil actually produced, regardless of what the pipe-line statements showed, yet we could not agree that those statements ought to have been excluded. It was not essential to their relevancy that they should, in and of themselves, accurately disclose how much oil had been really produced from the premises. There was testimony that they did not do so, but they supplied information which, in connection with the other evidence, might reasonably be considered by the jury in determining that matter for themselves, and this sufficed to justify their admission.
“That the judge of the Circuit Court was right in refusing to hold that the first suit was a bar to the second action. The frauds were different, any way. The first fraud for which a recovery was sought was for false representations made to the plaintiff by St. John as to the value of the property. * * * Mr. St. John professed to have that knowledge, and made false statements about it, for which the jury held him liable in the sum of $5,000. That was totally different from the $18,000 which he actually received as his reward from Gillespie [Glaspie] for helping to sell their land.” Keator et al. v. St. John (C. C.) 42 Fed. 585.
Subsequently Keator sued the seller of the same pine lands, and, upon writ of error in that suit, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said:
*830 “It.is further contended that the Circuit Court erred in instructing the jury that the case in hand-was not barred by a previous recovery in an action by Keator & Son against St. John. The merits of this contention can be best tested by a brief statement of the facts upon which the defense was based. Keator & Son first brought an action against St. John to recover damages for the same fraud and deceit that is complained of in the ease at bar, and in such suit recovered a judgment for $5,000, which judgment has not been satisfied. In the course of the trial of the latter suit for fraud and deceit, Keator & Son discovered that St. John had received $18,000 from Glaspie of the sum which they had paid for the pine lands. They thereupon brought an action against St. John for the latter sum, and recovered the amount sued for, with interest, which judgment has been paid. The last-mentioned action was brought and maintained solely upon the ground that St. John was their agent in negotiating the purchase of the pine lands, and that the profit which he had secretly made in that transaction through connivance with Glaspie belonged to his principals. In stating their damages in the present action, the plaintiffs below have given credit for the amount of the second judgment which was recovered against St. John, and was by him paid. It is now insisted that the payment of the second judgment against St. John for $18,000 and interest operated to satisfy the first judgment against him for $5,000 in the action for fraud and deceit, and that the satisfaction of the latter judgment bars a recovery against Glaspie in the present action. We are of opinion that the Circuit Court properly directed the jury to disregard the plea of a former recovery, for the reason that the cause of action sued upon in the second suit against St. John was totally unlike the cause of action in the first suit, and totally unlike the cause of action in the suit at bar. There might have been a recovery against St. John in the second action even though no misrepresentations had been made by him as to the quantity of timber that the pine lands would'yield, and the evidence which was sufficient to warrant a recovery in the second suit was utterly insufficient to justify a verdict in the first action. Furthermore, the damages recoverable in the respective suits were essentially different. These considerations warrant the conclusion that the payment of the second judgment against St. John did not operate to satisfy the first judgment for fraud and deceit, as was practically held by Mr. Justice Miller in Keator v. St. John (C. C.) 42 Fed. 585.” Glaspie v. Keator, 5 C. C. A. 481, 56 Fed. 210.
We concur in the views expressed by the learned judges in these cases, and we think that the position taken by the appellants' in this one cannot be reconciled with them.
3. The complaint of the answer which was made by the court below to an inquiry of the jury is without merit. The answer was simply responsive to the question propounded. It did not confine attention to the aspect of the case which the question presented. On the contrary, the learned judge said:
“And if you accept that which the parties put in their contract as the value of the property, based on a 402-barrel production, and you find that the production was, in point of fact, less, and, as we stated to you, that there was fraud, as we defined before in charging you, then you would be warranted in awarding as damages the difference between 402 barrels and what the production actually was.”
We find no error in this record, and therefore the judgment of the Circuit Court is affirmed.