Leonard v. Shaw

Searls, C. This is an action to recover five thousand dollars from the defendants for an alleged libel published of and concerning plaintiff, on January 12, 1894, in the San Benito Advance, a newspaper ^printed and published by defendants, at Hollister, in the county of San Benito, state of California.

The following is a copy of the article:

“ GONE TO ERESH PASTURES.

“L. B. Leonard, the erstwhile manager of an Industrial Publishing Company that never had a legal existence, has gone where the woodbine twineth, and the Nash Brothers, who indulged in the luxury of running a newspaper to vary the monotony of farm life, modrn as the whang-doodle o’er its first born. As manager of the semi-weekly Wet Hen, Leonard made the ghost walk longer than any of the journalistic pirates who ever located in Hollister, and he left a deeper hole in .the pockets of his backers. Leonard has been getting ready to skip for some time past, hut he stayed just long enough to induce a hide-bound board of supervisors to fix county printing rates according to his own starva[71]tion schedule, and then skipped off to pastures new in search of another batch of suckers.”

Defendants answered, raising issues of fact, which were tried before a jury, and a verdict in favor of defendants returned, upon which judgment was entered in their favor for costs.

This appeal is from the judgment and from an order denying plaintiff's motion for a new trial.

We cannot consider the motion for a new trial for several reasons, the most important of which is, that the statement contains no specification whatever of errors, or the particular reasons on which the moving party relies. (Nye v. Marysville etc. Street R. R. Co., 97 Cal. 461; Hershey v. Kness, 75 Cal. 115; Silva v. Holland, 74 Cal. 530; Dawson v. Schloss, 93 Cal. 194; Bohnert v. Bohnert, 95 Cal. 444; Pico v. Cohn, 67 Cal. 258; Ferrer v. Home Mut. Ins. Co., 47 Cal. 416; Spencer v. Long, 39 Cal. 700; Budd v. Drais, 50 Cal. 120; People v. Central Pac. R. R. Co., 43 Cal. 398.)

There is printed in the record what purports to be a copy of the notice of motion for a new trial, which states that the motion will be made upon the minutes of the court, but it is not embodied in any statement or bill of exceptions, and is not verified in any way, and hence forms no part of the record and cannot be recognized. (Code Civ. Proc., secs. 659-61.)