Lee v. Wilkinson

• Decision Date: 16 June 1913
• Citation: 62 So. 275,105 Miss. 358
• Court: Mississippi Supreme Court
• Parties: MARY M. LEE v. M. M. WILKINSON

62 So. 275

105 Miss. 358

MARY M. LEE v. M. M. WILKINSON

Supreme Court of Mississippi

June 16, 1913

March 1913

APPEAL from the chancery court of Harrison county, HON. T. A. WOOD Chancellor.

Suit by Mary M. Lee against M. M. Wilkinson. From a judgment for defendant, plaintiff appeals.

The facts are fully stated in the opinion of the court.

Reversed and remanded.

Mayes &amp Mayes, for appellant.

The decision should be reversed.

1. The entire inadequacy between what this man claims to have paid for the property, being a sum of twenty-six dollars, and the value of the property, which is shown to be about four hundred dollars, shocks the conscience; itself is evidence of fraud, as this court held in the case decided last week of Baldwyn v. Anderson. In that case the inadequacy was in the proportion of three to one; in this case, it is in the proposition of more than fifteen to one.

2. The ignorance and want of education and the station in life occupied by this colored woman are such as to make her an easy victim, and this is a pregnant circumstance which the court will look to in weighing the transaction between these two parties which turned out so disastrously for her. A shrewd white man engaged in the pawnbroker's and the loan shark business, on the one hand, and an old uneducated negro woman, on the other.

It is true that this man undertakes to avoid the flagitious character of this transaction by depreciating the value of the property. His depreciation of the value of the property consists in the fact that he has succeeded in several other instances which he cites, in putting over similar transactions.

3. We invite the court's attention to the further fact that these memoranda which this appellee says were given to this woman to remind her of her right to redeem, or exercise an option and given to her monthly, are nothing of the sort. This man took from the old woman a straight out deed. She evidently did not understand its legal effect. It did not make any difference what was said in her presence. There was no element whatever of aggregatio mentium, which makes a binding contract.

At the same time that he took this deed from this old woman, he gave her a receipt which appears at the top of page nine of the record. The deed is on page eight. They were both executed at the same time; they are part of the same transaction; each is part of the other, and instead of that memoranda being a statement to the old woman that she could exercise an option it was a receipt for a contract. The word "contract" in here must be construed as referring to the deed; was a receipt for a contract to be returned to M. M. Lee or bearer, on the payment of eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents on or before a day stated, and the paper contains an express stipulation fully set forth, that if that eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents was not paid on the day stated, the consequence should be, not that the woman should lose her land by virtue of the deed which she had executed; not that the right to exercise the option which is claimed to have been extended to her should lapse; but that then Mr. Wilkinson without making any demand on her, should put up and sell said property at either public or private sale, and at such sale might purchase the same for himself.

It is said that obviously it was not intended by this paper to stipulate that he might put up and sell the deed. We agree to that. What is referred to as that which might be put up and sold, is the land which the deed purported to convey.

There is nothing very singular in this transaction, even putting the color on it the old woman claims. Of course, this old woman is ignorant. She has no conception whatever of the legal bearings of these transactions, but, nevertheless, it remains true that her theory about what happened and what was the intent of the parties, is perfectly consistent with a practice that has existed amongst English speaking people from time immemorial, and that is to pledge a piece of land by a deposit of a deed? It may be a good legal notion, or a bad one, but it is a notion which has always existed, and it would be nothing singular if this old darkey had some sort of an idea moving about in her head that the thing could be done that way. Even if she had understood that this was a deed.

Looking at this transaction, we submit to the court that it is a manifest fraud, and should be set aside, and this old woman should have her homestead lot back.

T. M Evans and R. F. Langston, for appellant.

Appellee's counsel is incorrect in his conclusion that counsel for appellant has practically abandoned the theory of fraud, for we have insisted on this in our brief. If appellee's counsel is correct in his conclusions of law, then the whole transaction is a fraud on its face. Counsel says that the deed deposited was absolutely valueless in itself, and therefore could not be placed in pawn, and that the pawn-slip could not have referred to the land; then if that was true, the pawn-slips referred to as exhibits "B-H" was a worthless paper and void, and there is nothing in Mississippi more elementary than that the execution of a void paper is a fraud in law; so if these papers executed by appellee referred to as exhibits "B-H" was not what it purported to be and was not a pawnbroker's ticket, and was not such a document as the pawner could not demand the restoration of the property intended to be pawned by her, then it was a void document, and a fraud.

Counsel for appellee insists that it required parol testimony to explain the deed and the pawn ticket referred to as exhibit "A" and exhibits "B-H," and that unexplained, appellant has no standing in court. Counsel here misstated the law; there is no law authorizing such an explanation of the papers as will vary or contradict the written agreement; the law only permits the identification of the papers and such an explanation of the papers and such an explanation of the circumstances under which they were made as will not change the intention of the parties as expressed in the written contract. The appellant has simply attempted in her evidence to identify the papers by parol testimony and to testify to the circumstances under which the papers were...