Consult the advance sheets and bound volumes of the official reports for final revisions and proper pagination. Defendant asserts that an erroneous description of the property contained in the notice of hearing, even if it had actually reached defendant, would not have provided defendant with legal notice because defendant had no interest in the property described. Defendant cites the Department of Treasury's subsequent correction of the error, in an affidavit recorded with the register of deeds, as proof of the seriousness of the mistake. Despite this typographical error, the challenged notice, in the hands of an interested party of ordinary intelligence, would have served to identify the property at issue with reasonable certainty. Therefore, while the inadvertent omission of one of the digits in the number 14 was a defect, it was not fatal.
Defendant also argues that the trial court erred in applying the doctrine of laches.
According to defendant, the application of laches here required factual findings precluding summary disposition. Assuming that the trial court did apply laches, which is doubtful, we need not determine whether its ruling was in error. Our Supreme Court rejected the merits of defendant's due process argument, and we do so today with respect to the property description issue. Therefore, because defendant's claims of error are without merit, if the trial court improperly applied the doctrine of laches, any error was harmless.