Court Opinion

ID: 9761843
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 01:56:43.742525+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:27.071203
License: Public Domain

MONTEMURO, Judge,
dissenting:
Although I join the majority’s well-reasoned analysis on the question of appealability, I cannot agree on the merits that the doctrine of collateral estoppel precludes Ms. Shepegi from raising her forgery defense in this action. I therefore dissent.
The majority recognizes that collateral estoppel will bar relitigation of an “issue of fact” only if the prior decision on that issue was essential to entry of a valid and final judgment. The majority also recognizes that the “issue of fact” at stake in Ms. Shepegi’s action to open the confessed judgment was the authenticity of the signature on the promissory note. The majority concludes, however, that the authenticity of the signature on the mortgage was “essential” to the trial court’s decision in the action to open and that the doctrine of collateral estoppel therefore precludes Ms. Shepegi from challenging in the present action the authenticity of that signature. In an effort to explain this non sequitur, the majority suggests that the parties in the action to open somehow agreed to “focus” on the authenticity of the mortgage signature as a means of conclusively establishing the authenticity of the promissory note signature. This implausible explanation has absolutely no support in the records of either the present action or the action to open. In the action to open, the parties submitted several documents to various handwriting experts to determine whether the documents contained the signature of Ms. Shepigi. For reasons unknown, the parties included among these documents copies of the mortgage, which was not then in issue, but failed to include copies of the promissory note upon which Mr. Zarnecki had confessed judgment. Nothing in the record indicates that the parties agreed to treat evidence of the mortgage signature as evidence of the *248promissory note signature. Neither the trial court nor the parties consciously recognized the authenticity of the mortgage signature as important to, much less determinative of, the issue then at hand. We should not allow a simple oversight in a prior action to bar Ms. Shepegi’s right to prove her defense in this action. I would therefore reverse the order of the trial court.