Boyd v. United States

• Decision Date: 11 May 1955
• Docket Number: No. 15108.,15108.
• Citation: 222 F.2d 493
• Parties: R. E. BOYD and Odessa Boyd, Appellants, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

222 F.2d 493 (1955)

R. E. BOYD and Odessa Boyd, Appellants, v. UNITED STATES of America, Appellee.

No. 15108.

United States Court of Appeals Eighth Circuit.

May 11, 1955.

Robert C. Downie and Wm. M. Moorhead, Little Rock, Ark., submitted brief for appellants.

Reginald W. Barnes, Attorney, Department of Justice, Washington, D. C. (Perry W. Morton, Asst. Atty. Gen., Osro Cobb, U. S. Atty., Little Rock, Ark., and John F. Cotter and George S. Swarth, Attorneys, Department of Justice, Washigton, D. C., on the brief), for appellee.

Before SANBORN, WOODROUGH and JOHNSEN, Circuit Judges.

JOHNSEN, Circuit Judge.

The Government condemned, as part of the site for an air base, 15.7 acres of appellants' 82-acre farm in Pulaski County, Arkansas, leaving appellants with their residence, outbuildings and 66.3 acres of land remaining. On a trial without a jury, the District Court awarded them compensation of $1375, and they have appealed from the basis and amount of the court's award.

In substance, their contention for reversal is that they were allowed compensation only for the taking and severance of the 15.7 acres from their small farm unit, and were erroneously denied damages, and the opportunity to prove any, for the diminution in market value which additionally would be occasioned to their remainder by the fact that the 15.7 acres taken were to be used for airbase purposes, as opposed to some other or general utilization of the taken property.

The applicable general principles are well settled. "Whenever there has been an actual physical taking of a part of a distinct tract of land, the compensation to be awarded includes not only the market value of that part of the tract appropriated, but the damage to the remainder resulting from that taking, embracing * * * injury due to the use to which the part appropriated is to be devoted." United States v. Grizzard, 219 U.S. 180, 183, 31 S.Ct. 162, 163, 55 L.Ed. 165, 31 L.R.A.,N.S., 1135. The use to which an appropriated part of a tract is to be devoted means, for purposes of any depreciating injury occasioned to its adjoining remainder, "the uses to which the land taken may, or probably will, be put". Sharp v. United States, 191 U.S. 341, 352, 24 S.Ct. 114, 116, 48 L.Ed. 211. But a landowner's right to compensation for such a depreciating injury to his remainder has relation only to the affecting use that may be made of the taken part of his own tract and "does not include the diminution in value of the remainder caused by the acquisition and use of adjoining lands of others for the same undertaking." Campbell v. United States, 266 U.S. 368, 372, 45 S.Ct. 115, 117, 69 L.Ed. 328.

Appellants therefore could not claim a right to prove or recover for any diminution in value which might be occasioned to their remainder by the fact that it was being made to adjoin an air base generally, of which their 15.7 taken-acres were to constitute merely some slight, incidental or abstract segment — for example, a vacant border area — having no specifically demonstrative and directly affective utilization or function. Any depreciating injury which would exist to their remainder in such a situation would have to be regarded legally as being simply a consequence from the air base generally and as not being provably a product of their 15.7 taken-acres. And in respect to such a general, depreciating injury only, appellants would, of course, be in no different position of damage than their neighbors, whose farms the air base also adjoined, although none of their land had been appropriated for inclusion therein.

Hence, only as appellants might be able competently to establish — from the plans and scope of the undertaking, the location of and the part intended to be played by their 15.7 taken-acres therein, and other definitive, probative elements in the situation — that their included tract was intended or would be reasonably likely to have some particular utilization in the project, which, from its nature and immediacy to their...