Penner v. Elliott

• Decision Date: 28 February 1945
• Docket Number: 89
• Citation: 33 S.E.2d 124,225 N.C. 33
• Parties: PENNER v. ELLIOTT.
• Court: North Carolina Supreme Court

33 S.E.2d 124

225 N.C. 33

PENNER v. ELLIOTT.

No. 89

Supreme Court of North Carolina

February 28, 1945

Plaintiff brought this action to recover damages for an alleged slander publicly uttered against him while defendant was traveling in a bus of the White Transportation Company in the City of Asheville. It is charged in the complaint that the defendant uttered concerning plaintiff the following false and defamatory language: 'J. R. Penner (meaning the plaintiff) is a man who will not pay his honest debts; that he will not work and is a man that respectable people had best not have anything to do with. ' Plaintiff complains that the said false utterances held him up to 'public ridicule and contempt, thereby destroying plaintiff's good name and standing in the community,' and that, as a proximate cause thereof, he has suffered damages in the sum of $1000.

In a further count of the complaint, plaintiff alleges that the defamatory utterances were malicious, reckless and wanton and without legal excuse or justification, and asks for $1000 as punitive damages.

The complaint contains no allegation of special damages.

To this complaint the defendant demurred as not stating a cause of action, and moved to dismiss.

Upon the hearing the trial judge overruled the demurrer, and the defendant appealed, assigning error.

Sale Pennell & Pennell, of Asheville, for defendant appellant.

Thomas A. Curry, of Asheville, for plaintiff, appellee.

SEAWELL Justice.

Slander, as that term is appropriated to oral defamatory utterances as distinguished from libel, may be actionable per se or only per quod. That is, the false remarks in themselves may form the basis of an action for damages, in which case both malice and damage are, as a matter of law, presumed; or the false utterance may be such as to sustain an action only when causing some special damage, in which case both the malice and the special damage must be alleged and proved.

The policy of the law has much restricted the range of defamatory utterances which are actionable per se. Some statutes, with which we are not here concerned, make a limited number of defamations slanderous per se; but ordinarily we must look to the history of the subject in the common law, under the guidance of our own decided cases, in order to determine which are of that character. Included amongst them are accusations of crime or offenses involving moral turpitude defamatory...