Booth v. Thompson
| Decision Date | 04 October 1882 |
| Citation | 49 Mich. 73,13 N.W. 363 |
| Court | Michigan Supreme Court |
| Parties | BOOTH v. THOMPSON. |
The supreme court, in reviewing a chancery cause, is confined to the case alleged; and if the proofs do not sustain it, or if they make out a different case, the bill will be dismissed.
Appeal from Wayne.
Ward & Palmer, for complainant.
B.J Prentis, for defendant and appellant.
The circuit court decreed in complainant's favor and the defendant appealed. It is necessary first of all to see upon what basis relief is asked; because the court is confined to the case alleged. There is no doubt in regard to the head of jurisdiction to which the bill must be assigned. It is referable and referable only to the remedial equity for annulling proceedings to prevent them from working future mischief. The phraseology is in some parts vague and nearly if not quite equivocal, and were the complainant trying to profit by the obscurity of his statments he would be met by the familiar rule which requires a pleading to be construed most strongly against the pleader. But the sense in which the bill is justly to be understood is not a matter about which the court is in any doubt. The legitimate effect of the various averments is that no mistake was made in the terms of the deed from William Booth to complainant to call for reformation; and the bill is not framed as a bill to change the wording of the deed, nor are the proper parties for such a case before the Court. Again the complainant makes no claim that the cause is within the statutory jurisdiction for removing clouds hanging over titles. Comp.Laws, � 5072. Facts to fit the suit thereto are wanting, and the relief prescribed by the statute would be hardly appropriate, and further no such relief is invoked. The case as set out leads only in one way, and looks to the getting rid of the levy and the proceedings founded on it, and to no other relief.
Assuming that the scheme of the bill is coherent and its allegations consistent on this, the only theory admissable, the substance is that on February 18, 1878, William Booth the complainant's father owned the "west seventeen feet" of a certain lot number 6 together with an adjoining strip one and a half feet wide, and that day sold and conveyed the premises to complainant for $4,000; that the description in the deed was not written plainly and the register of deeds in copying it into the records made a mistake, and instead of writing the words "west seventeen feet," wrote "west seventeenth part;" that defendant on the fourth of April, 1879 sued the grantor, complainant's father, and in August recovered a judgment against him for $1,405.31, and in December following took out an execution, which the sheriff on the twentieth of January, 1880, levied on all the...
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