Reports of Cases in the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia (Volume 90) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Opinion. of hands is not admissible, say that it is so settled by the cases referred to by them. The case of Sharp v. Sharp, in 2 Leigh, 271, while it was a case where the handwriting was proved by a witness who had never seen the testator write, cannot be considered as a case in point here. In the case of Pepper v. liamett, 29 Gratt. 405, the witness who had seen the party write only once, and testified that he was not familiar with the handwriting and would not be able from his knowledge of her handwriting to distinguish it from that of others, but that he was of opinion, from having compared the signature in question with the one he saw her make, that it was genuine, was admitted as a competent witness, and his evidence held admissible. In Burruss' Case, 27 Gratt. 946, Judge Moncure says: "As a general rule, certainly, documents irrelevant to the issues in the record cannot be received in evidence at the trial to enable the jury to institute a comparison of hands, or to enable a witness to do so. This is clearly the rule in England, especially according to the modern cases, and although it is said that the American decisions on the subject are far from being uniform, yet it cannot be said that in this State the correctness of the rule has ever been questioned by any decision of this court." Citing 1st Greenleaf on Evidence, section 579. And Mr. Green- leaf cites the case of Doe v. Suckcrman, supra, where the judges were evenly divided upon this question. In the same case Judge Moncure said, speaking of the opinion of a witness oil the genuineness of the handwriting in question: "It is a statement, not of facts to which a witness generally testifies, but of mere matter of opinion, to which a witness rarely testifies, and only in special cases and for peculiar reasons...