Court Opinion

ID: 9735474
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:17:10.127355+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:58.998264
License: Public Domain

FOURT, J.—I dissent.
The defendant C. W. Colgrove in this case was a graduate of the University of Minnesota and a lawyer who invariably referred to the plaintiffs in this ease as his clients. Of the plaintiffs, one had a grammar school education and the other had attended high school. One was a printer and one was a clerk in a public utility in Chicago. Plaintiffs had sent to Colgrove at his request considerable sums of money from their earnings, with which he was to purchase oil leases and an oil rig. Great trust and confidence were placed in Colgrove by plaintiffs. Colgrove went broke in a patent-medicine venture and reported to his clients that by an order of a federal judge he had been put out of the business of marketing his patent medicine and that he was going to retire from the business; that he was going to take an oil lease and would set aside 10 acres out of an 80-acre parcel for the benefit of the plaintiffs. He never told the plaintiffs that he had purchased the lease with the money they had advanced to him for the oil rig. There was a variance in the survey of the land to be leased and it was learned by Colgrove that there was within the area which he had leased 160 acres instead of 80 acres. Colgrove *164failed to advise the plaintiffs of the difference. Colgrove wrote many letters to plaintiffs which disclose clearly that he was guilty of the most flagrant fraud. Colgrove had every advantage over plaintiffs, he knew the facts and he knew that the property in question was worth millions; the plaintiffs trusted Colgrove implicitly and had no firsthand knowledge of the facts.
. The plaintiffs accepted as authentic the fraud of Colgrove and the statute of limitations should not start to run until the time at which the plaintiffs discovered the facts; it should make no difference whether it was 4 or 40 years. The right to trust is as important as the duty to disclose. Colgrove did,not tell plaintiffs that he got 160 acres instead of 80 acres, that he had paid no consideration, that he had divided the lease into two halves and placed plaintiffs into only a part of one of the halves and that he had taken the other half to himself. True it is that the trial court apparently found that those things were not done intentionally by Colgrove to deceive or defraud. However on the face of it and the record bears it out, the conduct of Colgrove in almost his every act was patently designed to deceive and mislead. To hold otherwise is to whitewash duplicity and fraud.
In short this is a case where Colgrove, an attorney, now relies upon the statute of limitations because he claims in -effect that his clients did not investigate soon enough, although the clients were led to place their trust and confidence in Colgrove and by his actions, in effect, were slow in determining what a monstrous piece of duplicity and fraud he really had practiced on them.
To affirm the judgment "in this case is legalism run riot and makes for a travesty of justice. Laymen might well wonder whether courts protect those (and particularly attorneys) who have made a shambles of the truth or do they protect -those who have a cause of action because of the fraud and ..deceit which has been practiced against them.
I would reverse the judgment and ventilate this case with a little fresh air.
■ A petition for a rehearing was denied March 26, 1969, and appellants’ petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied April 23, 1969.