Court Opinion

ID: 9442955
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 19:05:15.053025+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:29:18.172777
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
It seeems to-me that both the trial judge and my distinguished colleagues of the majority are laboring under a delusion. In their opinion, all that is necessary for the plaintiff to establish in his case of conspiracy to defraud creditors is merely to, allege such a-conspiracy in his complaint, and then sit back complacently in the belief that the mere allegation without proof shifts the burden to the defendant and imposes on him the duty to prove his innocence. Such, in my opinion, is not the law, and it has never been the law.
I agree with that large part of the court’s opinion which is devoted to the great "weight to be accorded to the findings of the trial judge, who tried the case without a jury. No citation of authorities is necessary to prove this point which is Universally recognized. That is particularly true in this case, because I entertain the highest respect for the learning and probity of the trial judge whose friendship I have enjoyed for many years. But this rule completely fails where, as in this case, there is no evidence whatever to sustain his decision.
Here the plaintiff produced nothing whatever in the way of proof except to pile inference on inference and surmise upon surmise in support of the allegation of one of the most serious charges known to the law — conspiracy to defraud. There is not a particle of evidence in the record to indicate even remotely that Colonel Wynne knew of the so-called judgments in North Carolina at the time of the conveyance. He did know, as did everyone who read the newspapers, that Boone was engaged in a bitter fight with his former wife over the custody of their children. As to Boone there is not one scintilla of evidence to show that he had any purpose to defraud anybody. He desperately needed funds to carry out his defense against the efforts to wrench the custody of his weeping and reluctant children from him and to return them to the custody of his former wife who had previously been adjudged to be of such dissolute and abandoned character as to be unfit to have their custody. Boone appealed to' Wynne who befriended him by loaning him money. Shortly thereafter Wynne was ordered overseas and, his wife not being familiar with business, he had a perfectly natural desire to put his affairs in shape before his departure, as many another soldier has done. He suggested to Boone that, since the latter could not repay his debt, he should convey the title to the property in question to Mrs. Wynne. Boone acquiesced which was the only thing an honest man could have done.
In order to maintain this action, the law required that it be upon clear and convincing proof. In this case there has been no proof at all.
Most of the opinion of the Court ■ is *227taken up with matters wholly outside the record. Consequently, it seems not amiss to say that, from the time Boone’s children were given over to his former wife on the pretense that she had completely changed her dissolute and disgraceful character by teaching a Sunday School class, down to the present case, Colonel Boone has received exceedingly scaly treatment from the courts of the District of Columbia.