Jones v. Diver

John G. Diver sued Matthew M. Jones for slander.

The complaint contained two paragraphs. The first averred that the defendant said of the plaintiff, “in my opinion the hitters that Diver fixed for Smith were the cause of his death; ” and the paragraph averred that Jones used the words in a criminal sense, intending to charge Diver thereby with the murder of Smith, and that so the hearers understood, &c.

The words do not, in their usual sense, import a charge of murder; and there is no colloquium showing that they were used in a conversation about Smith as having been murdered, &c., so as to…