Hart v. Bates
| Citation | 17 S.C. 35 |
| Parties | HART v. BATES. |
| Decision Date | 05 April 1882 |
| Court | United States State Supreme Court of South Carolina |
1. Where a judgment creditor purchases at sheriff's sale the " land assigned as a homestead" to the judgment debtor, supposed at the time to include an entire tract, he or his assignee are not thereby estopped from afterwards bringing an action as owner of a junior judgment to set aside as fraudulent a prior deed covering such part of the tract as has been judicially ascertained not to have been included in the sheriff's sale and deed. No question of election of remedies is here involved.
2. According to the Duchess of Kingston's case (2 Sm. Lead. Cas. 424), three things are necessary to sustain the plea of res judicata: 1, the parties must be the same, or their privies; 2, the subject-matter must be the same; 3, the precise point must have been ruled.
3. An assignee of a judgment is a privy of his assignor only in regard to the judgment, and is not bound by an adjudication in an action between the assignor as purchaser of land covered by the lien of such judgment and a third person.
4. An assignee of a junior judgment is not estopped from attacking a deed of the debtor as fraudulent, because that, subsequent to the assignment, in action between himself (as purchaser prior to the assignment, of the judgment-debtor's land under a senior judgment) and a grantee of such debtor by deed intermediate the judgments, a part of the land was recovered by the grantee on the ground that it was not included in the sheriff's sale and deed, no question of fraud in the grantee's deed being there made. And the assignee not being estopped, a subsequent purchaser from him is not estopped.
5. A judgment is not conclusive of every question which might have been made in the case, as is sometimes erroneously said, but only of matters that had of necessity to be determined before the judgment could have been given.
6. A judgment is certainly not conclusive of a matter of fraud when the question of fraud was not raised, and the facts constituting the fraud were not known to the party injuriously affected.
7. A recorded deed from an embarrassed father to his son expressed to be for valuable consideration, is no notice to parties in interest of fraud in the conveyance.
8. Adverse possession is not complete until full ten years have expired, and the statute of limitations does not begin to run in favor of a fraudulent deed until the discovery of facts constituting the fraud.
Before THOMSON, J., Greenville, March, 1880.
Action by Sarah J. Hart, assignee, against John Bates, Sr., John Bates, Jr., Green L. Walker, Mary A. Walker, Sarah C. Good, and Valentine G. Wood-the last three being made parties under order of Judge Pressley. The facts and the order of the Circuit judge sufficiently appear in the opinion of this court. The exceptions are long, but they raise only the precise questions considered by this court.
Mr. T. H. Cooke, for appellant.
This was an action to set aside certain deeds of land as fraudulent and void. A short statement of the facts is necessary to make the judgment intelligible. John Bates, Sr., of Greenville, became embarrassed, and on March 5, 1867, Turner and Barton recovered judgment against him, and in May, 1869, E. A. Kelly and J. W. Coleman and other creditors obtained judgments against him. On October 23, 1867, he made a deed to his son, John Bates, Jr., of his lands, consisting of two tracts, which for convenience we will call No. 1 and No. 2, consisting in the aggregate of 492 acres. The deed expressed the consideration of $385.63.
John Bates, Jr., on Oct. 26, 1869, conveyed back to John Bates, Sr., a part of tract No. 2 (87 acres) in trust for his daughter, Sarah C. Good, the consideration stated being $125, and the remainder of that tract, 199 acres, to the defendant Green L. Walker, in trust for his wife, Mary, another daughter of John Bates, Sr., upon the consideration stated of $175. John Bates, Jr., still lived with his father on No. 1 until 1874, when he moved to tract No. 2. John Bates, Sr., and Green L. Walker are now in possession of tract No. 2. On July 16, 1869, while John Bates, Sr., was living on tract No. 1, he had a homestead assigned to him by metes and bounds, represented as containing 410 acres, more or less, and believed to embrace all the lands covered by the deed from John Bates, Sr., to John Bates, Jr.
In this way John Bates, Sr., and his family held all his lands until 1876, when Turner and Barton, whose judgment was not only older than the constitution allowing homestead, but also older than the deed to John Bates, Jr., had the " " homestead" assigned to John Bates, Sr., levied on and sold, and one A. A. Hart became the purchaser and received sheriff's titles; which described the land levied and sold as that which had been assigned to John Bates, Sr., as his " homestead." After this sale John Bates, Sr., removed to the parcel of tract No. 2 which had been reconveyed to him as trustee for his daughter, Mrs. Good, and A. A. Hart, the purchaser, under some proceeding ousted John Bates, Jr., from tract No. 1. About that time Hart discovered that his deed conveying the land which had been assigned as homestead did not include tract No. 2, and he purchased the judgments of Kelly and Coleman, and had them levied upon tract No. 2. He became the purchaser also of that tract and took sheriff's titles.
In 1877 John Bates, Jr., brought an action against A. A Hart for tract No. 1, from which he had been ousted. Hart stood on his first deed from the sheriff, describing the land purchased by him as that which had been " assigned as homestead," but when that was located it was found not to cover 151 acres of tract No. 1, for which Bates had a verdict and Hart for the remainder. This recovery must have been founded upon the original deed from John Bates, Sr., and in this action the question of its bona fides was not made. There was no appeal.
There was still a balance upon the judgments unpaid, and in 1879 A. A. Hart assigned them to his wife, Sarah J. Hart, who as assignee of the judgments instituted these proceedings to set aside as fraudulent and void the deed from John Bates, Sr., to his son, the said John Bates, Jr. The plaintiff offered proof that the deed was without consideration and void as to creditors. The defendants offered no evidence, but moved to dismiss the complaint on the ground mainly that the question of the bona fides of the deed from father to son had been adjudged in the case of Bates v. A. A. Hart , and that Sarah J. Hart was a privy of A. A. Hart, the defendant in that case, and could not now assail the deed as fraudulent. The plaintiff replied that as assignee of the judgments she was not a privy of A. A. Hart in respect to the deed to John Bates, Jr.; but if she were such privy, the fact that the deed was fraudulent was not known at the time of the trial of the case of Bates v. A. A. Hart , but was discovered afterwards, and being subsequently discovered, the question was not made and could not have been adjudged in that case . There was no evidence going to show that the plaintiff or her assignor had knowledge of the alleged fraud at the time of the trial of the former case. On the contrary, the plaintiff showed that she had no knowledge of the alleged fraud until after said trial, and that she heard of the same for the first time in the latter part of 1878, and only shortly before the judgments were assigned to her. There was evidence showing that the alleged fraud had been talked about on the streets of Greenville many years before the plaintiff brought her action, but none showing that the plaintiff or her assignor had any knowledge of the same until the latter part of 1878. There was no evidence introduced to establish the fact that on the trial of the case of Bates v. Hart the question of the mala fides of the deed to John Bates, Jr., was in any way considered.
The presiding judge held as matter of law that while there was no proof of such issue having been made and determined, " he took it for granted it had been done ," and dismissed the complaint. The plaintiff appeals to this court. The exceptions are long and numerous to the rulings both of law and fact, but we do not think it necessary to consider them all seriatim , as enough has been stated to present the questions which, according to our view, must decide the case.
One of the findings of fact, however, should be considered before we reach the main point. The presiding judge found as follows:
According to the facts stated in " the case," this appears to be a misapprehension of both fact and law. The piece of land containing 151 acres of tract No. 1, which John Bates, Jr., recovered from Hart, and which substantially is the subject of this controversy, was never sold under the executions at all . The very ground upon which Bates recovered it from Hart was that the sheriff at his first sale sold only " the homestead," and when that was located it appeared that the sheriff's deed did not include this particular parcel, which had not been sold at all .
It is a mistake to say that " the creditors have exhausted their remedy under the...
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