Esposito v. Rabin

Syllabus

The plaintiff property owner appealed from the trial court's judgment for the defen- dants on her complaint and on two counts of their counterclaim, rejecting her request, inter alia, to quiet title in her favor to a disputed portion of her property on which the defendants, owners of abutting property, had encroached and trespassed. The plaintiff claimed, inter alia, that the court, which declined to quiet title for either party, improperly found that the defendants had acquired by adverse possession the encroachments they had placed in portions of the disputed area and that the plaintiff had trespassed on that area. Held: The trial court's failure to quiet title to the disputed portion of the plaintiff's property was contrary to law and could not stand, as the court was required pursu- ant to statute (§ 47-31) to make a full determination of the parties' rights to the disputed area by settling title thereto but, by its decision, allowed a cloud to remain on the plaintiff's undivested record title that negatively impacted its marketability. The defendants failed to establish by clear and convincing evidence all of the necessary elements of their adverse possession claim, as they did not provide the trial court with a description of the entire disputed area of the plaintiff's property they claimed to have acquired or a property description of their encroachments; accordingly, the trial court, having found that the plaintiff had complied with the requirements of § 47-31 (b), the judgment as to that count of her complaint seeking to quiet title was reversed and the case was remanded with direction to quiet title in her favor. The trial court improperly rejected the plaintiff's claims that the defendants' encroachments on her property constituted a trespass for which she was entitled to injunctive relief, as the defendants intentionally continued to use the disputed area of the property for their encroachments after they learned that they did not own the disputed area.