Court Opinion

ID: 9828160
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 18:09:49.268822+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:42:44.885593
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
After carefully considering the able and elaborate motion filed by counsel for a rehearing, we find no good reason for not adhering to the original decision in this case. The five eases discussed by counsel were decided before the statute here under consideration was amended. Those cases held that the giving of the notice was a condition precedent to the right of the state to file a suit for the collection of delinquent taxes. Two of them held that the failure of the tax collector to give the notice within the time prescribed by law was a bar to the right of the state to thereafter sue for those taxes. The three other cases held that such failure might be pleaded in abatement, but was not a bar to the state’s right to thereafter sue for the delinquent taxes. That was apparently the state of the court decisions at the time the amendment was adopted. >
 If it was the intention of the Legislature in amending the law to settle only the question as to whether or not the failure of the tax collector to give the notice was a bar to a subsequent suit by the state to collect delinquent taxes, that end could have been accomplished by couching the amendment ⅛ such terms as to make that intention certain. But that is not the language of the amendment. The Legislature wrote into the act that it .should be no “defense to a suit” for delinquent taxes. We are bound to give that language all the meaning its terms legally and commonly imply. ■ Any matter which, if pleaded, has the effect of defeating a suit and to cause the rendition of a final judgment adverse to the plaintiff, must be considered in a law a defense.
Counsel for appellant also requests that this question be certified to the Supreme Court. That, we think, is unnecessary, since the case is one which may be carried to the Supreme Court by application for a writ of error.
The motions are overruled.