State v. Woodruff

• Decision Date: 14 December 1903
• Court: Mississippi Supreme Court
• Parties: STATE OF MISSISSIPPI v. AMOS WOODRUFF ET AL. MOTION

35 So. 422

83 Miss. 107

STATE OF MISSISSIPPI v. AMOS WOODRUFF ET AL. MOTION

Supreme Court of Mississippi

December 14, 1903

October 1903

FROM the chancery court of, first district, Hinds county. HON ROBERT B. MAYES, Chancellor.

Woodruff and others, appellees, were complainants in the court below the State of Mississippi, appellant, and others were defendants there. The object of the suit was to subject a large quantity of lands to the payment of bonds, aggregating over $ 300,000, issued by one of the levee boards of the state. At the first term of the court after the suit was begun the defendants appeared and demurred to the bill of complaint, assigning various grounds of demurrer. The state's demurrer assigned, among other causes, that it was not amenable to the suit. These demurrers, all of them were sustained by the chancery court and the bill dismissed. The complainants, Woodruff and others, appealed to the state supreme court, where the decree sustaining the demurrers and dismissing the suit was affirmed on one only of the grounds of demurrer. See Woodruff v. State, 66 Miss. 298. Complainants then appealed to the supreme court of the United States, which differently determined the only question decided by the state supreme court, and remanded the cause. See Woodruff v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 291. When the case came back to the state supreme court it was then tried upon the causes of demurrer not previously passed upon by it and upon which the United States supreme court had not expressed an opinion. In this second hearing the state supreme court reversed the decree of the chancery court and remanded the cause to that court for further proceedings. See Woodruff v. State, 77 Miss. 68.

When the case upon its remand reached the chancery court the complainants applied for and obtained leave to amend their bill of complaint, and all of the defendants demurred, generally and specially, to the amended bill. The court sustained the special demurrers and overruled the general ones, and all parties, defendants, appealed to the state supreme court, and Woodruff and others complainants, prosecuted a cross-appeal. The supreme court of the state affirmed the decrees of the chancery court and remanded the cause for further proceedings. State v. Woodruff, 81 Miss. 456.

Being back in the chancery court, after the appeal and cross-appeal just mentioned, the state moved that court to dismiss it from the suit because, being sovereign, it was not amenable thereto. This motion the chancery court overruled, but allowed the state an appeal from its order overruling the motion to the supreme court of the state, under Code 1892, § 34.

When the case reached the state supreme court on this appeal, complainants, Woodruff and others, moved the supreme court to dismiss the appeal.

Motion to dismiss appeal denied.

Green & Green, for the motion.

J. N. Flowers, assistant attorney general, against the motion.

Argued orally by Marcellus Green, for the motion, and by J. N. Flowers, assistant attorney general, contra.

Frank Johnston and McWillie & Thompson and Mayes & Longstreet, represented their respective clients, defendants in the case, but none of them participated in the argument on the motion.

OPINION

CAMPBELL, Special Judge ^[*]

The right to appeal from an interlocutory...