Opinion ID: 2266700
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the trespass instructions

Text: The major thrust of the Greens' appeal focuses on the court's instructions on trespass to real property by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission and the Marbro Company. The appellants complain of the court's failure to instruct the jury that the prescriptive easement known as Bethesda Church Road was limited to that portion of plaintiffs' property actually used as a roadway for the prescribed period of time. Such an instruction he claims would have properly confined the prescriptive right-of-way to the 15-18 foot concrete portion of the roadway. The court on the other hand instructed the jury: The Sanitary Commission claims this 40-foot wide right of way was a public easement by prescription; that is, because the public had used it continuously for more than twenty years prior to May 1, 1967. In determining whether or not there was a forty-foot wide right of way on May 1, 1967, you may consider any evidence of public travel and/or maintenance by a public agency of this road. The appellants do not question the abstract legal proposition contained in this charge but only contend that the evidence presented at trial made it inapplicable to the case. They seem to suggest that the only permissible inference to be drawn from the testimony was that road maintenance and pedestrian traffic beyond the concrete surface of the road were occasional aberrations and merely incidental to the main use of the road. Therefore, they contend, these activities did not amount to the continuous adverse possession necessary to establish a prescriptive right-of-way. In this case we conclude that there was ample evidence of travel and maintenance to justify the trial court's instruction. There is no specific minimum use requirement needed to establish a public right-of-way by prescription, although slight or occasional use of unenclosed land is not sufficient. Feldstein v. Segall, 198 Md. 285, 295, 81 A.2d 610 (1951); Elliott, Roads and Streets, § 194 (4th ed. 1926). In the recent case of Garrett v. Gray, 258 Md. 363, 376, 266 A.2d 21 (1970) we found that acquiescence in minimal public travel from 1914 to 1961 sufficed to convert a farm road into a public way. There we said at page 378: True, the traffic may have been sparse; nonetheless, members of the public freely passed over it without seeking permission of the owners through whose property the road passed, and it was a continued and uninterrupted use by persons other than the property owners whose property is traversed by the road. In Feldstein v. Segall, supra , we concluded that a widened right-of-way no less than a new one, may be acquired by prescription. Mr. Green testified that since 1926 people have walked where the Sanitary Commission placed the ditch. In addition Russell W. Day, a highway maintenance supervisor, testified that he had worked for the State Roads Commission for thirty-seven years and that he personally had participated over this period in the maintenance of the hard surface and the dirt shoulders of Bethesda Church Road, which included that area where the trench had been dug. These statements answer appellants' assertion that no witness testified the adverse use here continued for the twenty year prescriptive period. The appellants assert that the trial court erred in giving an instruction based on our holding in Turner v. Washington Sanitary Comm. 221 Md. 494, 158 A.2d 125 (1960). In that case we held that in a developing suburban area the right-of-way for a public highway extends not only horizontally over the surface of the land for the purpose of travel but also vertically below the surface of the roadbed for the purpose of laying sewer and water lines. [1] The only grounds they offer to demonstrate the inapplicability of this holding to their case is that in Turner the easement had been acquired by a conveyance which clearly set out the lateral boundaries of the right-of-way. Their argument is that because the State acquired the right-of-way here by prescription and then only with great debate over the exact boundary lines, any instruction based on Turner was irrelevant, misleading and, worst of all, assumed the ultimate fact to be resolved by the jury. Conceivably the methods of aquiring title can affect the rights in the property obtained but we completely fail to see how the acquisition of this right-of-way by prescription could change the impact of the rule in Turner. Moreover, we believe that when Judge Mathias submitted the issues concerning the width of the right-of-way to the jury, his instructions were clear, elaborate, and unequivocal. They immediately preceded his discussion of the holding in Turner and made it obvious to the jury that as a prerequisite to finding this was a suburban road in which the Sanitary Commission had a right to lay its sewer lines they first had to decide that the pipes had in fact been laid within the State's prescriptive right-of-way. The questions of liability for the initial and continuing trespass q.c.f. were submitted to the jury without error. The finding of no liability obviates the need for us to discuss the appellants' questions concerning punitive damages against the Sanitary Commission or the questions appellees have raised concerning sovereign immunity.