Posted on 11/28/2007 11:41:46 AM PST by george76
The land-dispute case on Hardscrabble Drive isn't the first time a former Boulder judge has used the legal concept of "adverse possession" to win land from a neighbor.
Earlier this year, the secretary of the Indian Peaks chapter of the Sierra Club and his wife lost about 100 square feet of their property to Marsha Yeager, a former judge, and her husband, John Yeager.
The issue of adverse possession hit the spotlight earlier this month when Don and Susie Kirlin lost about a third of their property to their neighbors — former judge Richard McLean and his wife, Edith Stevens — after a judge ruled McLean and Stevens were more attached to the vacant land than the Kirlins.
The doctrine of adverse possession allows landowners who can show they've been openly trespassing on their neighbors' property for at least 18 years to make a claim to take that land.
Appeals courts hear adverse-possession cases a few times a year in Colorado. And while the Kirlins said they were blind-sided by their neighbors' move to take their land, Kirk Cunningham and his wife, Cosima Krueger-Cunningham, said they were well aware of the dangers of having fuzzy property boundaries.
Cunningham said the trouble with his neighbors on the 900 block of Seventh Street in Boulder started when he and his wife began a "quiet title" process, in which neighbors are asked to sign off on agreed-to property lines. The Yeagers didn't sign off, Cunningham said.
At issue was a stone wall meant to mark a boundary between the two properties, but which sat within the Cunningham property line...
After a contentious five-year battle, the Yeagers won the entirety of the land upon which the wall sits.
"The principal lesson for the public in all this is, in a place like Boulder ...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycamera.com ...
It’s about doing what is right.
.
“It’s not about legal rights.
It’s about doing what is right. “
It used to be.
don't live next to a judge or lawyer...
in Boulder.
Judges using their knowledge of the law to take advantage of their neighbors: shame is dead.
.
Persons who are overly learned about some small aspect of the law have a tendency to use this knowledge as a bludgeon on their neighbors.
In fact, law was originally formulated through trial and error, as a means of creating some sort of code by which persons in the community may live with each other, rather than escalating every dispute to a raging shrieking slap-fest. This use of the one small exception in the law (adverse occupancy) has once again been wrongly applied to give advantage to the clever over the less-informed.
Adverse occupancy can be countermanded, if it may be demonstrated that the occupancy is not essential for the further enjoyment of the property by the person who is encroaching, or if the encroachment is not available for general use by others. There is always the option of purchasing the property in dispute, if an adequately equitable resolution can be worked out.
Yeah, but why work to pay for what what you want when you can use the law to simply take it? Scary how expropriation of property is becoming more and more the norm and less and less the exception.
Both owners for decades acknowledged the stone wall as the property boundary. Each occupied and maintained his own side. Properties probably changed hands with the buyer(s) purchasing on the basis the wall was the boundary. Then along comes this joker who has a survey done and finds out the survey shows the wall was built in the wrong place. So, now he wants the wall and a piece of what everyone has treated for 20+ years as his neighbor's property.
Suppose his neighbor's house had been built partially on that strip 20+ years ago. Should he be able to demolish his neighbor's house?
This is why adverse possession is a good law, if, as with other laws, it is properly applied. If two land owners have treated a boundary as their boundary without objection for this long, that should be the boundary.
Huh? If they're trespassing ON THIER NEIGHBORS LAND, how is it not about legal rights?
Honestly, I woulda walked over to the neighbor's house and told him if he didn't stop trying to steal my land, he may wake up one day with his throat cut - prison be damned.
Oh, cripes...Draw up a boundary agreement and be done with it. We’re talking 100 sq. feet...say 1’ x 100’. Who made the money? The attorneys!
Just out of curiosity if my neighbors trespassed on my property without my knowledge and without my permission, while I was not home, can they do this to me?
They could, if they did it repeatedly for 18 years without your saying something to them about it.
Boulder District Judge Morris Sandstead, who served with McLean, issued the restraining order quite swiftly.
Serendipity, I guess.
http://www.denverpost.com/harsanyi/ci_7501264
The case is settled, if the parties don’t like it file an appeal. End of subject!
Thanks for the ping. Interesting.
Read the facts and you won't think that anymore. The case resulted in moving tha property line from it's historical location to the opposite side; how can that be just?
I’m talking about the rock wall case addressed in the posted article, not the empty lot case getting so much publicity right now.
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