Oscar F. Collins v. Penn Central Transportation Company

(dissenting) :

I dissent. The conduct of plaintiff’s counsel in his repeated and improper references to matters designed to prejudice the defendant, many of them in contravention of the trial judge’s directions, deprived the defendant of a fair trial.

To understand the issues here it must be realized that because of the extraordinarily long delay in the case’s coming to trial (some ten years after the accident) several employees of the then New York Central Railroad who had been involved in the Collins accident had died before trial. Evidently plaintiff’s counsel made no effort to depose these…