53 Pa. Super. 311 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1913
Opinion by
The defendant relied on a receipt for his acquittance of liability to the plaintiff. It purported to be a receipt signed by Mary A. Wilmarth for the entire debt which was the basis of the action and specifically identified the certificate of indebtedness on which the plaintiff claimed. Mrs. Wilmarth being dead the defendant was compelled to resort to evidence of the genuineness of her signature, and the testimony on this point justified the admission of the receipt as evidence. If the receipt was genuine it shifted the burden of proof, and to support a recovery the plaintiff was bound to present evidence which would take it out of his way. The document was not dated, but if signed by the decedent was sufficient to relieve the defendant from his liability unless it could be made to appear that it was obtained by fraud or was executed through accident or mistake or by means of some imposition or other circumstance sufficient to render it invalid. It is self-explanatory; it needs no witness to give it application to the indebtedness which the plaintiff alleges to be still due and is not to be got rid of by mere suspicion. It is the creditor’s own admission in writing that the debt is discharged, and the jury if satisfied of its genuineness under the evidence would not be at liberty to reject it except for what were described in Harris v. Hay, 111 Pa. 562, and in Rhoads’s Estate, 189 Pa. 460, as “weighty reasons.” The evidence offered to impeach the receipt was the deposit books of the decedent which contained no account of the deposit of the sum of money apparently covered by the receipt; testimony that Mrs. Wilmarth had a small personal estate and that she was a careful and methodical person and that the defendant had made the other payments on the same indebtedness by check but that no check was produced corresponding with the receipt. It was not incumbent on the defendant, however, to show
The judgment is reversed with a venire facias de novo.