Bedon v. Davie

Citations

• 144 U.S. 142
• 12 S. Ct. 665
• 36 L. Ed. 380
• 1892 U.S. LEXIS 2065

Syllabus

<p>A judgment for the plaintiffs was rendered in August, 1873, in a United States Court in South Carolina, in an action at law in ejectment, in which a minor was defendant, and appeared and answered by a guardian ad litemK and which minor became of age in December, 1885, and brought a writ of error, from this court, under § 1008 of the Revised Statutes, within, two years after the entry of the judgment, exclusive of the term .of the disability of the minor. The case involved the title to land in ■South Carolina under a will'made in 1819, the testator dying in 1820. In June, 1850, a suit in equity was brought in a state court of South Carolina, which set up that the title to the land, under the will, was either in the grandmother of the minor or in her sons, one of whom was the father of the minor, the'grandmother and the father of the minor being parties defendant to the suit, and the bill having been taken pro confe’ss'o against all the defendants, and dismissed by a decree made in March, { 1851, which remained unreversed, an appeal taken therefrom having been abandoned. The only title set up by the plaintiff in error was alleged to be derived through his father and his grandmother. In September, 1854, an action of trespass to try title to the land was brought in a state court of South Carolina, and which resulted in a judgment for the plaintiff therein, but to which the plaintiffs in the ejectment suit were not parties or privies. Held, that, as the decree in the equity suit was prior to the judgment in the trespass' suit, and as the plaintiffs in the ejectment suit were not parties to the trespass suit, the judgment in the last named suit was of no force or effect in favor of the plaintiff in error, as against' the decree in the equity suit.</p>