Davis v. O'Berry

In an opinion per curiam, filed January 16th, 1902, it is said : “This case is ruled by the judgment delivered in No. 101 'between the same parties (ante p. 708.) The construction placed in that case upon the sections of the registration law there involved is adhered to in this case when precisely the same sections of the same law are concerned. The appeal in that case was dismissed and so must this appeal be also dismissed for ⁷⁵² the same reason. There was an appeal from certain officer's of registration to the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County. The Court heard the case, and on July the fifth, nineteen hundred and one, decided it.

On the same day an appeal was taken to this Court. On September the twentieth, according to the body of the record, or September the twenty-fourth, according to the docket entries—and we do not know which date is right—a paper called “ an agreed statement of the case” was'filed in the Circuit Court. This agreed statement of the case does not purport to set forth the facts that were elicited in the trial before the Circuit Court, and we are left by it entirely in the dark, both as to the questions decided below and the grounds upon which the decision that was made was based. An appeal in a case like this cannot be brought into this Court in such a way.

If there hád been an agreed statement of facts filed below before the case was heard there a different situation would have been presented'. But we know of no practice which permits a statement of the case to be drawn up by counsel nearly three months after the determination -of the case, and which allows that statement to be taken as a sufficient certification of the evidence adduced below, when the statement itself does not even profess-to set forth what transpired in the trial Court. Such a method of bringing up a record in a case of this kind is irregular and wholly without precedent.' It has been supposed that what was said by this Court in Coulbourn v. Fleming, 7 8 Md. 215 , justified the course here pursued. But that is a palpable misapprehension.

The case of Coulbourn v. Fleming, was an appeal from an order passed on a motion to strike out a judgment. It was a summary proceeding. There was-no bills of exceptions but the transcript of the record contained a