Speaker 1: Hi, Tony DeWitt here, Missouri Appellate Attorney and a guy who likes to make the law make sense on YouTube. Today we're going to talk about the Stokes versus the McElvains, and it's an interesting Missouri case and it has lessons for people in every state. I'll have more in just a second. So this is a property dispute, and you'd be amazed at how many of these cases spring up in the course of an average year in courts throughout the country. Now, it usually happens when there's a dispute with regard to the boundary line, and that's usually where adverse possession comes in and other sorts of property issues. Somebody believes that the property line should be two feet over, somebody else believes it should be, you know, two feet the other way, and you wind up, you can't work something out, so you wind up taking it to court and that's where it gets decided. So in this case, let's look at how the court referenced the beginning of this lawsuit. Viewed in the light most favorable to the trial court's judgment, the evidence induced at trial reflects that McElvain owns real property adjacent to real property owned by the Stokes in Clay County, Missouri. They share a common property line running east to west with the McElvain property north of the line and the Stokes property south of the same line. Both properties are accessed from Nation Road, which is located along their eastern boundary lines. They are on a common boundary line, and that seems to be what the issue is here. McElvain purchased her property with her now deceased husband on April 23, 2007. That 2007 date is an important date here, and continues to reside there. McElvain's property consists of 23 acres, which is completely fenced and includes a home and a barn. McElvain and her late husband purchased the property from Ronnie Nick, who told her that he built the house in 1988 or 1999, and the whole fence line was there at that time. When McElvain purchased the property, she was told everything within the fence was her property. So at this point, I want to point out that this is an appeal from a court-tried judgment. In other words, it wasn't tried to a jury, and in that situation, the court drops a footnote and it says this, we review the evidence and all reasonable inferences in the light most favorable to the court's judgment. That would be important here as well. So as a result of this border dispute between the two, the McElvain property would be rendered smaller. The Stokes disputed McElvain's ownership of a strip of land approximately 2.89 acres located inside McElvain's fencing on the southern border of McElvain's property and adjacent to the northern edge of the Stokes property. McElvain informed the Stokes that she believed the disputed property belonged to her, and the only way to access the back pasture of the McElvain property is through the disputed property because Creek divides front east and back west parts of her property. That seems to be a problem. If indeed the property did belong to the other people, she couldn't get to the back pasture that she used. So how does that work out? Well, the court goes on. On April 11, 2019, McElvain filed a petition to quiet title by adverse possession, ejectment, and trespass damages against the Stokes and several other parties. Those parties were later dismissed. A bench trial was held on February 18, 2020. On March 9, 2020, the trial court entered judgment in favor of McElvain and against the Stokes on McElvain's claims of adverse possession, finding she established all elements of adverse possession and is entitled to obtain record title to the disputed property. So how do you prove adverse possession? Well, in Missouri, it works like this. You have to show actual possession. In other words, you have to be present on the land and using the property. It has to be for a continuous period. Possession has to be for at least 10 continuous years. It has to be hostile, meaning not that you go out there with pitchforks and torches and burn down the other guy's house. It just means it has to be adverse to them. It has to be open and they basically have to believe that they have the absolute right to be on that property. It has to be open and notorious, which means that everyone can see it, and it has to be exclusive. In other words, it has to be possession by a single person during that 10-year time. Now, the policy behind this is interesting, and let's get into the policy rather quickly here. The law rewards people who use property productively, and the law rewards people who move promptly to remedy a violation of their rights. So, stale claims are always disfavored. That's why there are statutes of limitation, and in Missouri, the statute of limitation on adverse possession is only 10 years. Now, in Alabama, the statute of limitations is 20 years. Now, some states also have may have other quirks. For example, they may require that you have to have an invalid title. In other words, you got a deed. It was a quit claim deed instead of a warranty deed. You believed it accurately described the property, but it did not, and as a result, you had this deed and you operated as though it was a deed. And then, you also have to be in good faith. In other words, you can't have known that this was somehow not your property. That's not the law in Alabama, and it's not the law in Missouri, but it is the law in several other states. So, moving back to the McElveen and Stokes dispute, here's what the court said. The appellate court will affirm the trial court's determination unless there is no substantial evidence to support it, unless it is against the weight of the evidence, unless it erroneously declares the law or erroneously applies the law. And the court is free to believe or disbelieve any or all of the testimony, and a claim there is no substantial evidence to support the judgment necessarily involves a review of the trial court's factual determinations. This is important. When courts make factual determinations instead of juries, they are entitled to the same respect that a jury is entitled to when it resolves disputed facts. And among those issues are the facts that are defound in an adverse possession claim. So, here's what the court says about that. In reviewing questions of fact, appellate courts defer to trial court's assessment of the evidence of any facts relevant to an issue contested. When the evidence is contested, we defer the trial court on factual issues. We accept the evidence favorable to the judgment as true and disregard any contradictory evidence. Now, this is where bad lawyering comes into play, because it happens a lot in appeals. When you get a judgment and the jury finds or the judge finds that you satisfied all of the elements of the claim, whether it's negligence or is in this case adverse possession, those facts are deemed found and they're entitled to respect. And when you claim there is insufficient evidence to support them, the evidence that's contrary to those facts is disregarded, because the jury or the judge obviously disbelieved them. So, you only look at the facts that are favorable to the judgment in order to argue that the judgment is against the weight of the evidence or not supported by substantial evidence. Unfortunately, that lawyer in this case didn't do that. Preliminary, however, must address the fact that both points failed to the Stokes' failure to conform to the mandatory requirements for not supported by substantial evidence challenges. That challenge requires, one, identify a challenged factual proposition necessary to sustain the judgment, identify all favorable evidence supporting that position, and then, three, demonstrate why that supporting evidence doesn't make the grade. The Stokes' argument for each point does not even attempt to follow or even acknowledge this mandatory three-step framework. Nonetheless, for both of these points, they do manage to identify the challenged ruling, but they don't get any further than that, because what they cite is all of the contradictory evidence. Here we have the court laying out what we have to do to get title by adverse possession. It has to be hostile, actual, open, and notorious, exclusive, and continuous for a period of years prior to the commencement of the action. So, you will notice that in the case, they bought this land in 2007, and it wasn't until 2017 that the other side raised an issue, and it wasn't until 2018 that the lawsuit was filed, and by that time, the 10-year period in which the Stokes' had to challenge this adverse possession had already run. Claimed the possession wasn't hostile, and they also claimed that the intent to exclude was not there, but as you'll recall from the earlier description, the entire property was fenced, and the court goes on to say, where the claimant occupies land without color of title in order of prevailing must show physical possession of the entire area claimed. This is shown by any combination of continued acts of occupying, clearing, cultivating, pasturing, building fences, or other improvements in paying taxes. The performance of all or any combination of these acts of occupancy serves as evidence of actual possessions, but it's not conclusive because every case must be decided on its own facts. The court then goes through a series of facts, starting with number 12, where it says the plaintiff or her assignees have continuously cleared and maintained the land, they have farmed the land, they have demonstrated an intent to possess, and they were there for 10 years before the June 2017 issue arose, and so the court ends this case by saying, thus even in the absence of analytical defects, the Stokes' points would fail. The trial court as fact finder found that McElvain established that she intentionally possessed, occupied, and maintained the disputed property to the exclusions of others. The trial court's findings are supported by substantial evidence, points one and two are denied, and they affirm the trial court's judgment. Now let's think a little bit about adverse possession and what a person who believes that somebody is squatting on their property needs to do. The first thing they need to do is one of two things, either move to eject that person, and sometimes that takes time and costs money, or two, give them permission. Go to them and say, okay you have you have my permission to be on this land for the next six months, and then at the end of that six months you move to eject them, or whenever it is you believe you wish to eject them, because if you give them permission to be there, and you'd need to do that in writing obviously, then they no longer have hostile possession. They have permitted possession, and that's a different, a horse of a different color, so to speak. Adverse possession is often called squatter's rights, but it isn't really squatter's rights. What it is is the law recognizing that the productive use of property is more important and more beneficial to society than the unproductive use. So when you buy a house at a tax sale, unaware that a bank has a lien on it, for example, and you continuously occupy that property, you improve that property, you pay the property taxes on that property, and 10 years down the road they have not moved to eject you or claim it, they can't come back and say, hey we've got a deed of trust and we own this property and you need to get off of it, because you will have acquired rights by adverse possession. And of course you bought it at a tax sale, and if the if the bank had wanted to preserve its rights, it should have appeared at the tax sale, and it didn't. So it's a very, very complicated area of the law, and if you think you have a case for adverse possession, you need to go see somebody who is a trial lawyer who has dealt with these kinds of issues. It's very complex. It takes a lot of work to prove one of these cases up. In this particular case, they got the neighbors to testify that the fence had always been there, that the McElvains had cleared the property, that they used the property, that they had put their horses and cattle out on the property. All of those things were important things for the lawyer to do and get done, and as a result they were able to prevail. But again, getting the right lawyer and doing it the right way is the important thing here, and you have to make sure that you've gone the entire statutory period. Like I said, in Missouri it's 10 years, in other states it's 20, some states it's even 25 years. So it takes a long time to acquire property this way, and somebody really has to be sleeping on their rights. They have to really be coming down and not paying any attention to what's going on with the property in order to lose their rights through adverse possession. Somebody asked me to make this video. I hope that I have answered their questions, but if not, please leave them in the comments down below. You know all the stuff we always ask you to do, like, share, subscribe, and of course, if you haven't already subscribed, I would appreciate you subscribing, and if you have subscribed, thank you so much for doing that. It helps us out with the YouTube algorithm and gets this information out in front of other people. Thank you again for watching. Have a marvelous day, and I'll catch you on here next time.

Speaker 2: If you like this video, here are a few others you might try, and don't forget to subscribe. Have a terrific day, guys.