Neaf v. Palmer

• Decision Date: 27 April 1898
• Citation: 45 S.W. 506,103 Ky. 496
• Parties: NEAF v. PALMER et al.
• Court: Kentucky Court of Appeals

45 S.W. 506

103 Ky. 496

NEAF v. PALMER et al.

Court of Appeals of Kentucky.

April 27, 1898

Appeal from circuit court, McCracken county.

"To be officially reported."

Suit by E. Palmer and others against Mollie Neaf for an injunction. Injunction granted, and defendant appeals. Reversed.

Campbell & Campbell and W. G. Bullitt, for appellant.

Charles K. Wheeler, for appellees.

HAZELRIGG J.

It is agreed that the appellant keeps a bawdy house on a certain street in Paducah, and that its presence there is shocking to the moral sense of the community, and is especially obnoxious and disagreeable to the immediate neighborhood. The proof also conduces to show that the maintenance of such a house unfavorably affects the salable value of property in its locality. The question is: May the chancellor, under these circumstances, enjoin the appellant from using the house in question as a bawdy house? The chancellor below answered this question in the affirmative, and at the instance of certain real-estate owners in the neighborhood, entered the order of perpetual injunction appealed from. At the threshold it is noticable that this is the first time in the jurisprudence of the state that the attempt has been made to suppress this evil by the substitution of the chancellor's orders in lieu of the processes of the criminal courts. This cannot be because new conditions have arisen, calling for the ever-expanding powers of the chancellor. The bawd we have always had with us, and the bawdy house. The absence of the exercise of such a power may not be conclusive against its use, but it is at least strongly persuasive that such power does not exist. It is not alleged that there are offensive sights or sounds about the obnoxious premises, but only that property is made less valuable in the vicinity, and that the moral atmosphere is tainted and pestilential. The injury is wholly consequential. It seems to us, under these circumstances, the criminal courts had best be left to enforce the criminal laws. These are confessedly entirely adequate for the purpose of suppressing such evils. To keep a bawdy house is to erect and maintain a nuisance, and is in itself a crime. The suppression of a nuisance, therefore, is but the infliction of a punishment for the crime. The one is inseparable from the other. The chancellor would therefore be, in effect, punishing the criminal by the civil process of injunction. In Anderson v. Doty,...