Case ID: mass_114/html/0446-01.html
Source: Caselaw Access Project
Author: {"author": "By the Court.", "license": "Public Domain", "url": "https://static.case.law/"}
Date Created: 2024-08-24T03:29:51.129683

Robert Wilkinson vs. William Garrett.
    An answer which sets up as an estoppel a judgment in an action of contract is not sup» ported by proof of a judgment in a “writ of ejectment.”
    Contract. The third count of the declaration alleged that the plaintiff agreed with the defendant to work for him from April 19, 1871, to April 1, 1872, and that the defendant agreed to pay him a certain sum a month and to give him the use and occupation of a certain dwelling, but that the defendant had refused to employ him, pay him, or furnish him with the dwelling-house. To this the defendant filed the following answer : “ At a court of competent jurisdiction, to wit, a Justice’s Court holden at Watertown, in said Middlesex, on the twelfth day of February, A. D. 1872, before Henderson J. Edwards, Esq., justice of the peace in and for the county of Middlesex, the defendant recovered judgment against the plaintiff in an action of contract, and that said judgment was rendered against the matters mentioned as the cause of action in the plaintiff’s third count; and that the plaintiff did not appeal from said judgment, but accepted the same as final, and that execution was issued thereon and the controversy settled and ended.”
    The case was tried in the Superior Court, before Wilkinson, J., who, after a verdict for the plaintiff, allowed the defendant’s following bill of exceptions:
    “ At the trial, the defendant, to show that the subject matter of this suit was settled in the court below, put the trial justice, H. J. Edwards, Esq., who heard the case below, upon the stand, and by him proved that he had searched there for the papers, and was satisfied that all the original papers in the case before him were lost. He testified that the case brought before him was ejectment by Garrett against Wilkinson; and it appeared in evidence that it was the house occupied by Wilkinson under the entire contract, and that he could not state whether there was a written answer or not, nor what the pleading was, and that it was a writ of ejectment. The defendant’s counsel then offered to show by him, by showing what the evidence in that case was, that, at the hearing had on the ejectment writ, all the matters relating to the special contract, and the breach of the same by the ill conduct of Wilkinson, were heard fully in the evidence, and that he gave judgment for Garrett, for breach of the contract by ill conduct of Wilkinson, from which no appeal was taken, and that execution was issued, and Wilkinson put out of the premises. The court rejected this offer of evidence as inadmissible.”
    
      I. D. Van Duzee & C. Brigham, for the defendant.
    
      W. F. & W. S. Slocum, for the plaintiff.
   By the Court.

The defendant pleaded a former judgment in contract in bar of this action, and the evidence offered did not support the plea.

Exceptions overruled.