California Insurance Company v. Allen, 15895.
Decision Date | 30 June 1956 |
Docket Number | No. 15895.,15895. |
Parties | CALIFORNIA INSURANCE COMPANY, Appellant, v. A. L. ALLEN and Dovie Moore Allen, Appellees. |
Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit |
David Bland, Houston, Tex., Austin Y. Bryan, Jr., Houston, Tex., of counsel, for appellant.
Samuel Williamson, John W. L. Hicks, Houston, Tex., for appellees.
Before RIVES, TUTTLE and JONES, Circuit Judges.
This appeal is from a judgment for $5,000, the amount of a policy of fire insurance covering a main dwelling and garage apartment located in Houston, Texas. Appellant insurance company claimed as its sole defense that the fire was deliberately set by or at the instigation of the insured A. L. Allen. The fire insurance policy was, of course, not intended to cover such a fraudulent loss,1 and it expressly provided that it would be vitiated by fraud on the part of the insured.2 Nor may an innocent wife recover when insured community property has been wilfully burned by her husband.3
The case was tried to the court without a jury. A. L. Allen took the stand in his own behalf and volunteered the fact that he had agreed to take a lie detector test. Appellant thereafter offered the testimony of Alcus Greer, an arson investigator for the City of Houston, who administered such a test to A. L. Allen and who interpreted the results as indicating that he did not truthfully answer the following questions:
At the conclusion of the evidence, the district court announced:
Formal findings of fact, conclusions of law, and judgment were thereafter entered, and this appeal ensued.
The appellant insurance company insists upon but two specifications of error:
As to the first specification, appellant frankly admits that it has found only one case4 which has allowed the general introduction of the results of lie detector tests. The authorities and decisions are practically unanimous in their rejection of such tests as evidence, until the training and expertness of the examiner has been more adequately standardized, and until there is general scientific recognition that reasonable certainty follows from such tests.5
Appellant insists, however, that when Allen took the stand in his own behalf and injected the fact of this having taken the lie detector test into the case, the results of such test became admissible for all purposes. We do not pass on the question of whether the district court would have abused its discretion in permitting the introduction in rebuttal of such evidence, otherwise inadmissible.6 We think, however, that the court exercised a wiser discretion when it considered such evidence only to the extent necessary to remove any unfair prejudice which might otherwise have ensued from the original evidence.7
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