Withenbury v. United States
| Decision Date | 01 December 1866 |
| Citation | 5 Wall. 819,18 L.Ed. 613,72 U.S. 819 |
| Parties | WITHENBURY v. UNITED STATES |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
APPEAL from the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Illinois.
Several libels were filed in that court for the condemnation, as prize of war, of large quantities of cotton and other property captured on the interior navigable waters of the United States, or on land adjacent thereto. On motion, these libels were consolidated, and various claims were interposed in the consolidated suit for portions of the property libelled. Among these claims was that of Withenbury & Doyle. They denied the validity of the capture, and insisted on their own title to nine hundred and thirty-five bales of the cotton.
Upon hearing of the cause as to this claim, an order was made dismissing the claim, with costs, for which execution was ordered.
From this decree the appeal now pending was taken, and a motion for dismissal was now made, upon the ground that the decree was not final, and therefore was not within the jurisdiction of this court.
A motion of a similar sort was made and argued at the same time in another and similar appeal, Le More v. United States.
Messrs. Ashton, Assistant Attorney-General, and Cushing, in support of the motion:
No disposition has yet been made of the libel, or of the cotton or its proceeds. The suit still remains pending in the District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. In Humiston v. Stainthorp,* this court, on a question of what is a final decree, assumed as of course the doctrine of The Palmyra, a case in admiralty, and where Marshell, C. J., says:
The inconvenience of admitting, in contradiction to the decision of the court in the case of The Palmyra, that a cause in admiralty can be divided so as to bring up successively distinct parts of it, is illustrated in the present case by the fact that not only have Withenbury & Doyle taken an appeal on their claim, leaving the cotton and the libel against it in the court below, undisposed of, but that other parties, namely, Le More, claiming a part of the same cotton on the same libel, but adversely to Withenbury & Doyle, have also taken an appeal, and entered it there. Thus we have two adversary sets of claimants, each splitting off from the main case, and from one another, and coming here with their appeals, while the main case still remains in the inferior court. Can appeals be thus evolved indefinitely from the body of one case? We think not; but that on rejecting all the claims against this parcel of cotton, the court below...
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