In the course of today's research of the the title of couple of tracts, I pulled the District Court docket file on a Trespass To Try Title suit that had been brought in 1904 by a fellow claiming to be the owner of a 1000 acre portion of a much larger tract. Unfortunately, his attorney apparently wasn't able to produce any evidence to support this claim and when the date on which the trial was set arrived, neither the plaintiff nor his counsel showed up in court.
Undeterred by this omission, a couple of days after judgment was entered for the defendants, the MIA attorney filed a motion for the court to set aside its verdict and grant the plaintiff a new trial. His grounds? Well, in his words:
>1. The judgment of the court is contrary to the law.
>2. The judgment of the court is contrary to the evidence.
Hmmm. Well, that was easy enough. But wait, there's more:
>3. Plaintiff's Counsel was prevented from attending this trial and being present and representing Plaintiff herein on account of sickness as appears by the Certificate of his attending physician and was wholly physically unable to try said case if he had been present.
It's sort of a "my dog ate my homework reason, so just to close the sale, the attorney pulled out all the stops for why a new trial was needed:
>4. Plaintiff is the owner of the land involved in this suit by good and perfect title and said Defendants are squatters on it and have no title and never had.
Sadly, this same member of the bar had never bothered to produce any evidence of his client's "good and perfect title", so the record does not disclose its details. The objection that the Defendants were squatters was funny considering that they had plead various statutes of limitations, including one that would apply to "squatters".
I don't think that this worthy member of the bar got 33% of the 1000 acres as his legal fee.
Well isn't 33% of 0 still 0? Sounds like it worked out for all folks involved. 🙂
> Well isn't 33% of 0 still 0? Sounds like it worked out for all folks involved.
That case (aside from the default judgment) is typical of the situation that the statutes of limitation on adverse possession were enacted to resolve. The subject was a 1000 acre tract that the defendants had held under duly recorded deeds for about 34 years, but it would appear, without record title. Along comes the son of the last record owner of the tract who had acquired it from the original patentee in 1847 and was "ejected therefrom with force and arms".
