New Orleans Mobile & Chicago R. Co. v. Martin

• Decision Date: 09 June 1913
• Docket Number: 15,953
• Parties: NEW ORLEANS, MOBILE & CHICAGO RAILROAD COMPANY v. B. C. MARTIN ET AL
• Court: Mississippi Supreme Court

62 So. 228

105 Miss. 230

NEW ORLEANS, MOBILE & CHICAGO RAILROAD COMPANY v. B. C. MARTIN ET AL

No. 15,953

Supreme Court of Mississippi

June 9, 1913

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

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

Affirmed.

Flowers Alexander & Whitfield, for appellant.

Stevens & Cook and Tally & Mason, attorneys, for appellee.

OPINION

REED, J.

Appellant, by this appeal, requests us to reduce the amounts of the fees allowed to the solicitors for appellees by the chancellor upon dissolution of injunction.

Appellant filed a bill in the chancery court against appellees, four in number, and obtained an injunction restraining them from prosecuting their several and separate suits in the circuit court against appellant for damages from personal injuries resulting from the derailment of a train. The amount named in each of these suits for damages is ten thousand dollars. Shortly after the bill was filed this court decided the case of Cumberland Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Williamson, 101 Miss. 1, 57 So. 559, wherein it was held that equity would not enjoin several actions at law on the ground of multiplicity of suits, where there is merely a community of interests in the questions of law and fact involved, and where there is no community of interests or of right in the subject-matter.

At the first term of the chancery court after the bill was filed the several defendants filed their separate demurrers to the bill and motions to dissolve the injunction. They were represented by different counsel. The case was set down for hearing upon the demurrers and motions, and there were filed at the same time notices of the claims by appellees for damages to be presented upon the hearing of the motions to dissolve the injunction. Each of these notices included a claim for solicitor's fee for defending the injunction suit as an item of damage. After the filing of all the papers mentioned by appellees, and the case was duly set down on the docket, appellant filed a written request with the clerk of the court to dismiss the case, and filed in the court a motion for dismissal, and also filed a motion to remand to rules and dismiss.

We now quote from the final decree: "The court considered the cause on all pleadings, by consent of all parties, and heard arguments in the premises. And on the hearing hereof the court now decrees that for the...