Burney v. Brown
Burney v. Brown
Opinion of the Court
The plaintiffs claim from the defendants the value, of eighty thousand bricks, and the rent of fifty-nine acres of land, amounting, according to an account annexed to the petition, to $1255. The defendants pleaded the general issue, and prescription. There was judgment against them for $800, with interest at the rate of five per cent per annum ; and they have appealed! It is contended, on the part of the defendants, that the plaintiffs’ claim for bricks was properly reduced to one for forty thousand, as in a suit formerly brought in the Court of Probates, they had claimed payment for the latter quantity only, and there is some evidence that no greater quantity was delivered. It is also urged that the court erred in allowing interest, the suit having been brought against the heirs in the District Court, after a partition of the succession among them.
There is an admission in the record that no judicial claim was made of the rent, until the inception of the suit in the Court of Probates, in January, 1839. The claim is for rent in 1832. Admitting that it began on the last day of that year, it expired on the same day in the year 1833, when the prescription began to run, and was acquired on the last day of the year 1836. The suit in the Court of.Probates was not brought until several years after-wards, to wit, in January, 1839.
The plaintiffs, therefore, had no legal claim except for the bricks. The court sustained it for eighty thousand bricks, at $10 per thousand, and gave judgment for $800. We think that it erred, and that forty thousand bricks only were proved to have been delivered. The interest was improperly allowed from the first of January, 1834, the period of the death of the defendants’ ancestor. Under the Code of Practice, it ought to have been allowed from the inception of the suit in the Court of Probates.
It is, therefore, ordered, that the judgment be annulled and
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Irene Burney and Husband v. John Brown, Tutor, and another
- Status
- Published