Court Opinion

ID: 9620268
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:40:28.716863+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:10:53.013650
License: Public Domain

ZIMMERMAN, Justice
(dissenting):
I dissent. The majority here, like the majority in the court of appeals’ unpublished opinion, has managed to do what appears to be equity to the Garlands, who built a cabin on property neither they nor their vendors owned, after paying the full purchase price to their vendors. The majority accomplishes this result by concluding that the two vendors, Ray Hall and Floyd Rigby, must have been acting as agents for Rimaras, Inc., a corporation they apparently controlled, when they sold the property to the Garlands in 1981. Ri-maras held record title in the property from 1980 until 1987, when one of its creditors, Anna Fleischmann, foreclosed her lien on the property via sheriff's sale.
The difficulty with the majority’s position is that despite the suggestion to the contrary, the Garlands never claimed that Hall and Rigby acted as agents for Rimar-as, nor did they claim that Rimaras was an alter ego of Hall and Rigby, nor did the trial court find that Hall and Rigby were agents of Rimaras, nor is there any evidence in the record that allows any such finding. The majority here, like the court of appeals’ majority before it, created a theory of agency, which the Garlands did not assert, and then found something in the record that purports to prove its conclusion. In my view, the record does not support a finding of agency, either by Justice Howe’s discussion of ambiguous pleadings and arcane rules about attributing admissions to Rimaras, a party that never entered an appearance in the case, or by the court of appeals’ reliance on a stipulation of some of the parties that they entered into only after the trial judge had made his critical and unsupported finding.
Perhaps the best backdrop for interpreting the majority opinion is a statement of the trial court judge himself. After informing the attorneys that he was going to find that the property belonged to the Garlands and was beyond the reach of Fleisch-mann, Rimaras’ creditor, the judge stated:
The Court ... finds to hold otherwise would in essence so shock the Court that the idea of giving Mrs. Fleischmann the parcel of real property with the cabin on it, the Court in all equity and fairness just couldn’t do it and that’s the basis of the Court’s decision. So the Court finds against the Defendant. Now, I’m having a hard time getting there, to be honest. But I just feel like I just couldn’t find otherwise.
When all is said and done, the trial judge’s remarks could have been spoken by the majority of both the court of appeals and this court. If we were to be candid about this decision, we would admit that we are straining to uphold Judge Tibbs’ decision, not on facts or law, but on some visceral notion of equity. It may be true that awarding the property and cabin to Mrs. Fleischmann would “shock the Court,” as Judge Tibbs put it. But something more than sheer outrage at Rigby’s and Hall’s defrauding of the Garlands, which appears to be misdirected to Mrs. Fleischmann, should support the denial of title to an innocent third-party creditor who paid $10,000 for that title at a sheriff’s sale.
If the majority is bent on doing some ill-defined form of equity rather than the justice the law requires, we would better serve the law, of which we are the custodians, if we dismissed the writ of certiorari. We then would leave Judge Tibbs’ result in place and the law unaffected by the court of appeals’ opinion, an opinion that was, probably quite wisely, designated for non-publication.