Harris v. Crowder

• Court: West Virginia Supreme Court
• Writing for the Court: NEELY
• Citation: Harris v. Crowder, 322 S.E.2d 854, 174 W.Va. 83 (W. Va. 1984)
• Decision Date: 20 November 1984
• Docket Number: No. CC938,CC938
• Parties: , 51 A.L.R.4th 893 Jeff HARRIS v. Marvin C. CROWDER, et al.

Page 854

322 S.E.2d 854

174 W.Va. 83, 51 A.L.R.4th 893

Jeff HARRIS v. Marvin C. CROWDER, et al.

No. CC938.

Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia Nov. 20, 1984.

SYLLABUS BY THE COURT

1. "A joint tenant may convey his undivided interest in real property to a third person. When one of two joint tenants conveys undivided interest to a third person the right of survivorship is destroyed. Such third party and the remaining joint tenant hold the property as tenants in common." Syl. pt. 4, Herring v. Carroll, W.Va., 300 S.E.2d 629 (1983).

2. W.Va.Code, 37-4-3 [1957] allows the involuntary partition of a joint tenancy if "the interest of the other person or persons so entitled will not be prejudiced thereby."

3. When husband and wife hold property as joint tenants, creditors of one joint tenant may bring a creditors' suit to force the partition of the jointly owned property either in kind or by sale; such a forced partition destroys the survivorship interest of the non-debtor spouse because the creditors can stand in the shoes of the debtor and ask the court to do on their behalf what the debtor could do for himself; however, when creditors seek to force the partition of a husband and wife's jointly held marital home to satisfy judgments against one spouse alone, a court of equity should strictly follow the directives of W.Va.Code, 37-4-3 [1957] that allows a forced partition of a joint tenancy only if the interests of the other joint tenant will not be prejudiced.

4. A proceeding to enforce a judgment lien against real estate may be joined, under Rule 18, W.Va.R.C.P. with a proceeding to partition the property in kind or by sale, but when the two proceedings are joined, both the jurisdictional and procedural requirement relating both to judgment lien enforcement sales and partition sales must be met.

Charles E. Hurt, Charleston, for plaintiff.

William W. Pepper, Pepper & Nason, Charleston, for defendants.

NEELY, Justice:

Our task today, for the first time in West Virginia decisional law, is to determine whether creditors can execute upon a husband's undivided interest in property held jointly with his wife. In the case before us the ineluctable logic of received property law strains in one direction while common humanity and sound public policy strain in the other.

Marvin C. Crowder and Mary Ann Crowder, his wife, bought their family house from Mitchell and Anna Clay, giving the Clays a first deed of trust to secure the purchase money note. Initially both Mr. and Mrs. Crowder lived on the purchased premises, but at the time the creditors' suit that is the subject of this appeal was brought they had separated and Mr. Crowder was living elsewhere. In the circuit court Jeff Harris, the plaintiff below, tried to enforce his March, 1982 judgment against Mr. Crowder for $9,241. Mr. Harris asked that the circuit court refer the case to a commissioner to take and state an account showing the nature, amount and order of priority of all valid and subsisting liens against Mr. Crowder's real estate and to force a sale of Mr. Crowder's property to discharge the plaintiff's lien.

The case was referred to a commissioner who reported that the plaintiff had an eleventh priority lien against the defendant's property. The record before us indicates that Mr. Crowder had a small army of creditors. ¹

In February, 1984 the Circuit Court of Kanawha County denied Mrs. Crowder's motion to exclude from execution the property that she and her husband held as joint tenants with the right of survivorship and appointed a special commissioner to sell the jointly held property and retain the proceeds until further order of the court. The court then certified on his own motion the following question to this Court:

Where Husband and Wife are joint owners of a parcel of land and the only encumbrance against Wife's undivided one-half interest is a recorded deed of trust securing a note signed by she [sic] and Husband, but where there are numerous judgment and tax liens filed against Husband solely, in addition to the deed of trust, should the Circuit Court grant Wife's Motion to Dismiss, where one of Husband's judgment lien creditors files suit seeking a judicial sale of both Husband's and Wife's interest in the said parcel; or, simply put: Can a judgment lien creditor maintain a creditor's action to sell jointly-owned property where his judgment is against only one of the joint property owners?

Unfortunately, the answer to this certified question is neither a simple "yes" nor "no." Each case of this type must be processed individually with due attention to considerations that we shall illuminate below.

I

In Anglo-American law there have been two methods by which a husband and wife can hold property and more or less protect that property from the judgment creditors of one of them alone. The first of these methods is the tenancy by the entireties that survives in twenty-two common law states ² and the second is the joint tenancy. We held in Wartenburg v. Wartenburg, 143 W.Va. 141, 100 S.E.2d 562 (1957) that tenancies by the entireties have been abolished in West Virginia by statute. Under W.Va.Code, 36-1-20 [1981], however, joint tenancies continue to flourish here.

There is no question in this jurisdiction that one joint tenant can unilaterally destroy the right of survivorship of the other joint tenant by voluntarily conveying his interest to a third party. Recently we held in syl. pt. 4 of Herring v. Carroll, W.Va., 300 S.E.2d 629 (1983) that:

A joint tenant may convey his undivided interest in real property to a third person. When one of two joint tenants conveys his undivided interest to a third person the right of survivorship is destroyed. Such third party and the remaining joint tenant hold the property as tenants in common.

In this regard West Virginia is not eccentric; we follow ancient and well-established law. 2 W. Blackstone, Commentaries * 185. ³

In fact, since 1539 when a statute on this subject was passed in England a joint tenant has even been allowed to destroy the right of survivorship without a conveyance by suing out a writ of De participatione facienda in a court of equity and partitioning the land. The 1539 statute, 31 Henry VIII, Chapter I, says in relevant part:

II. Be it therefore enacted by the King our most dread Sovereign Lord, and by the Assent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and by the Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, That all joint Tenants and Tenants in common, that now be, or hereafter shall be, of any Estate or Estates of Inheritance in their own Rights, or in the Right of their Wives, of any Manors, Lands, Tenements, or Hereditaments within this Realm of England, Wales, or the Marches of the same, shall and may be coacted and compelled, by virtue of this present Act, to make Partition between them of all such Manors, Lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments, as they now hold, or hereafter shall hold as joint Tenants, or Tenants in common, by Writ De participatione facienda, in that case to be devised in the King our Sovereign Lord's Court of Chancery, in like manner and form as Coparceners by the common Laws of this Realm have been and are compellable to do, and the same Writ to be pursued at the common Law.

It is instructive for our purposes here to follow the evolution of early statutes on this subject because one year after the above statute was enacted, in 1540, a remedial statute was passed, 32 Henry VIII, Chapter XXXII which expanded the circumstances under which a writ of De participatione facienda would issue to include estates for life or a term of years and then protected other joint tenants from prejudice as a result of operation of the writ. The expansion of the instances in which the writ would issue is of no relevance to us here, but what is of relevance is that the 1540 statute inserted a new proviso governing the administration of writs of partition. That proviso was the embryonic authority for courts of equity to evaluate each case in which partition is sought to determine whether there will be "prejudice" to joint owners who are not party to the suit. The exact wording of the 1540 statute is:

II. Provided alway, and be it enacted, That no such Partition or Severance hereafter to be made by force of this Act, be, nor shall be prejudicial or hurtful to any person or persons, their Heirs or Successors, other than such which be parties unto the said Partition, their Executors, or Assigns.

This proviso from the 1540 statute on partition is carried forward in an even stronger version in our own W.Va.Code, 37-4-3 [1957] where the Code says:

... in any case in which partition cannot be conveniently made, if the interests of one or more of those who are entitled to the subject, or its proceeds, will be promoted by a sale of the entire subject, or allotment of part and sale of the residue, and the interest of the other person or persons so entitled will not be prejudiced thereby, the court ... may order such sale. [emphasis supplied by court].

It is well established, therefore, that a joint tenant may bring an action to partition, and that the court will partition the property in kind or by sale, but only if no prejudice will result to the other joint tenant. "Prejudice," of course, is an extraordinarily difficult word to define: in this context, at least, the term has a certain inherent elasticity.

The appellant, Mr. Crowder, argues that his rights in the property are subject to his wife's survivorship interest and that, therefore, the creditor can sell only that which the debtor owns. But, as Herring v. Carroll, supra, holds, the debtor "owns" the right to destroy the survivorship interest by a voluntary conveyance during his lifetime. Under syl. pt. 4 of Herring, supra, whenever a joint tenant conveys his interest in the tenancy to a third party there is a rupture of the four unities necessary for a joint tenancy and the owners thereupon become tenants in...