Court Opinion

ID: 8123044
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-09-09 15:02:10.64226+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:39:05.793165
License: Public Domain

Love, D. J.
Was this cause rightfully removed into this court? If it was, the legal results are certainly most extraordinary, not to say unjust.
The plaintiffs here sued the sheriff of Linn county, in trespass for—as they alleged—seizing the plaintiffs’ property by a writ of attachment issued against other and different parties. If the plaintiffs’ allegations be true, the sheriff dispossessed them of their property without any warrant of law whatever. Most certainly, if .this was a wrongful seizure, the sheriff ought to respond to the plaintiffs for damages, and look for indemnity to the attaching creditors, at whose instance and in whose interest he made the seizure. Nothing, at all events, can be clearer, in point of law and in common justice, than that the plaintiffs ought to have a right to be heard somewhere—in some tribunal—against the sheriff in such a case. To deny them this common right would certainly be to inflict upon them a flagrant wrong. Now, if the plaintiffs’ motion to remand be denied, he will be deprived of all right to assert his cause against the sheriff—a public ministerial officer, alleged to have committed a trespass upon thp plaintiffs—in any tribunal whatever.
These defendants, who were the attaching creditors in the state court, intervened in the action against the sheriff, and obtained an order discharging the sheriff from that action and substituting themselves. To this order the plaintiff excepted; and surely, whether the action of the district court of Linn county was right or wrong, he had a right to be. heard on his exceptions before the supreme court. And if, upon a hearing in the supreme court, the order of the court below had been reversed, the sheriff would have been retained as a party to the plaintiff’s action, -and the cause could not have been removed into this court, because the sheriff and the plaintiffs are both citizens of Iowa. But these defendants, having succeeded in getting the sheriff out of the case, and being themselves citizens of Illinois, immediately removed the cause into this court, upon the ground that the *307sole continuing controversy was between themselves and the plaintiff, citizens of different states. The removal carried the whole case into the federal court, it being now well settled that the whole cause, and not any part of it, must be transferred by the removal. Nothing remained in the state court upon which it could act, and there was no cause there from which any appeal could be taken to the supreme court of the state. Thus the defendants, by their voluntary intervention and by the removal, deprived the plaintiffs of their action against the sheriff in the court below, and of their rights to a hearing upon their exceptions in the supreme court of the state.
The defendants have now got the plaintiffs into this court. What is the result ? The sheriff is out of the case entirely, and the defendants have succeeded in depriving the plaintiffs of any hearing whatever against him in the district court of Linn county, in the state supreme court, and in this court. This court cannot hear the plaintiffs, to assert anything whatever against the sheriff, because the sheriff is not here. If he were here, his presence would oust the jurisdiction, and the court could do nothing but remand the cause to the state court. Thus, though the sheriff may, at the instance and request of the defendants, have committed a flagrant trespass against the plaintiffs, he goes entirely free, and the injured party has no redress whatever against him. The sheriff is personally within the jurisdiction; he may have property here; he is presumably a responsible man; he has, at all events, given bond, with approved sureties, for the indemnity of injured parties. The plaintiffs sought their remedy, as they had a clear right to do, against the sheriff, a public officer, who committed the alleged trespass. What is the result of the intervention and removal? The plaintiffs are driven to prosecute their suit in this court against non-resident parties, who may be insolvent, and whoso property, if they have any, is, in all probability, beyond the jurisdiction and process of the court.
It is our judgment that it was not competent for the defendants to displace and supplant the original defendant and remove the cause, so as not only to deprive the plaintiffs of all remedy against him, but of a hearing of his cause in any court whatever.
The motion to remand is sustained.
McCrary, C. L, concurs.