WEST AFRICA TRADING CORPORATION, Appellant, v. ALRAINE (Liberia) LTD., Appellee.

MOTION TO DISMISS APPEAL. Argued April 9, 1975. Decided May 2, 1975. 1. There is no legal justification for the rule of thumb requiring an amount be pledged in the appeal bond equal to one and one-half times the amount sued for. 2. A sufficient description of realty in the affidavit of sureties means property so described as to make finding it on the ground an easy exercise ; the Court suggested the best means to be the number of the plot of land and its description by metes and bounds. A motion was brought to dismiss the appeal on the grounds that insufficient security had been pledged in that one and one-half times the amount sued for was not provided in the appeal bond, and the realty pledged was not sufficiently described to establish the lien of the bond. Though the Supreme Court denied the arguments principally advanced by the appellee, it was of the opinion that the lack of identification of the realty would make difficult appellee’s efforts to locate it. The motion to dismiss the appeal was granted. M. Fahnbulleh Jones for appellant. Yangbe and Toye C. Barnard for appellee. Moses K. MR. CHIEF JUSTICE PIERRE delivered the opinion of the Court. This case has come up to us on appeal from the judgment rendered in the Sixth Judicial Circuit Court, sitting in its December 1973 Term. Plaintiff who is the appellant herein, had sued by attachment for damages, and complained that warehouse space leased to the appellee had been used in a manner to cause cracks in the building, to the damage and in224 LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS 225 convenience of the lessor. A firm of general contractors, Housing Development and Construction Corporation, was invited to examine the condition of the building, and their report as to the cause of the cracks complained of by the apellant, is very interesting. Defendant appeared in the action and filed an answer, in which it was contended that there was no ground for attachment according to law ; that the applicatory affidavit filed with plaintiff’s complaint is false in many respects, especially when it alleged that repeated demands for the sum sued for had been made ; that although plaintiff had sued for the sum of $147,499.00 as damages, yet the attachment bond contained no fixed amount, that is, one and one-half times the sum sued for as required, by which defendant could be indemnified as the law requires ; that the attachment bond was defective because it did not have an affidavit of sureties appended thereto. Defendant also contended that cracks in the walls of the building, and the sunken floor, were caused by cheap material used, and poor construction of the building, and supported this contention by a report submitted by the firm of Milton and Richards, architects and engineers. Defendant denied responsibility for the condition of the building and claimed that it was caused by the failure to have observed sound professional precautions, and that the type of soil on which it was built required the employment of certain measures in keeping with good architectural policies to insure its stabilization. A jury deliberated on the evidence after the issues of law had been passed upon and the case ruled to trial. The jury returned a verdict denying plaintiff the damages sued for. Judgment was rendered on this verdict, to which plaintiff excepted and announced an appeal to the Supreme Court. After completion of the appeal, the appellee filed a motion to dismiss the appeal, on several grounds, which we shall review later, and appellant resisted. 226 LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS The first two counts of the motion to dismiss are based on the fact that the penalty in the appellant’s appeal bond is not one and one-half times the amount sued for, and the appellee contends that for this reason the said bond is defective. While it is true that filing a defective bond is ground for dismissal of an appeal, we contend that the defectiveness of the bond must be clearly shown and not assumed. According to our Civil Procedure Law the only reason for filing an appeal bond in civil cases is that it will indemnify the appellee from all costs or injury arising from the appeal, if unsuccessful, and that the appellant will comply with the judgment of the appellate court or of any other court to which the case is removed. Rev. Code r :51.8. This is the most recent legislative enactment, but is contained verbatim in the 1956 Code, Title 6, � 1013, as well as substantially the same in the Revised Statutes before it. Rev. Stat., � 426. The question of requiring the indemnity of an appeal bond to be one and one-half times the amount sued for, is not mentioned in either one of the foregoing sections, and we have wondered what the legal authority is for this requirement in appeal bonds. Not being able to find legal ground for the requirement, we are unable to uphold this reason for dismissing an appeal. In this case the amount sued for is $147,499.00, and the indemnification provided in the appeal bond is $5,000.00. The question we ask ourselves in this circumstance is, could this smaller amount properly indemnify the appellee against cost or injury it might sustain? The foregoing sections relating to indemnity require that the security of the bond be fixed by the court, and, further, that should the bond be insufficient, it may be made sufficient before the trial court loses jurisdiction over the case. Rev. Code i :5 r.8. The bond must have been approved by the trial judge. Nor have we been able to find anything in the record to LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS 227 show that there was any exception taken to either of the sureties, as is allowed by section 63.5 of the Civil Procedure Law, contained in our Revised Code. We must assume, therefore, that appellee must have been satisfied with the sureties, and with the amount inserted in the bond as indemnification. Can counsel at this stage raise the question of the defectiveness of the bond, on the ground of insufficiency of the indemnification? We do not think so, because making the bond sufficient could only have been done before the trial court lost jurisdiction. We shall now consider count three of the motion to dismiss. In this count the appellee has stated that the affidavit of the sureties, attached to the bond, does not contain a sufficient description of the property pledged to establish the lien of the bond, in accord with statutory requirements, and on this ground the appeal bond should be dismissed. Our Civil Procedure Law contains the applicable section. “3. Affidavit of sureties. The bond shall be accompanied by an affidavit of sureties containing the following: “(a) A statement that one of them is the owner or that both combined are the owners of the real property offered as security; “(b) A description of the property, sufficiently identified to establish the lien of the bond ; “(c) A statement of the total amount of the liens, unpaid taxes, and other encumbrances against each property offered ; and “(d) A statement of the assessed value of each property offered.” Rev. Code i :63.2 An inspection of the bond shows that there is an affidavit sworn to March 25, 1974, filed with it, and for the purpose of this opinion we will quote from it. “Personally appeared before me, a duly qualified Justice of the Peace, Emmanuel Lue and Henry Temah, 228 LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS at my office in the City of Monrovia, Montserrado County, who being duly sworn, depose and say: i. That they are the sureties whose names appear on the plaintiff/appellant’s bond to which this affidavit of sureties is attached. “2. That they are freeholders and householders within the Republic of Liberia and own real property to the value of the said bond over and above their liabilities. “3. That the assessed value of their properties is $6,020. “4. That the foregoing statements are true and correct to the best of their knowledge.” Does this affidavit contain a description of the sureties’ property “sufficiently identified to establish the lien of the bond,” as the statute requires? We interpret this part of section 63.2 (b) to mean offering the property as security in order that an appellee be protected against loss as a result of costs or injury sustained by the appeal. BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY has defined description relating to real property to mean “that part of a conveyance, advertisement of sale, etc., which identifies the land or premises intended to be affected.” In giving effect to the text of this statute, we must consider that description of land merely means designating the particular space occupied, or to be occupied so as to enable anyone to find it, should this become necessary. Hence, in deeds which convey real property we have description by metes and bounds, to sufficiently and correctly identify the particular plot of land. With this as a background it is our opinion that description as used in this section means that land offered as security for appeal bonds must be described in the affidavit of the sureties sufficiently well to identify the particular piece of property intended to be encumbered by the bond. It is not sufficient to say that a surety owns an acre on a particular street; that property must be ,( LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS 229 described in a manner to make finding it on the ground an easy exercise. We hold that this is best accomplished by stating the number of the plot and the metes and bounds. In such circumstance there would be no difficulty in designating the land with certainty. The description of property intended to be used as security in appeals, must be of such certainty and definiteness that locating the property would not be difficult; nor would satisfying any obligation by virtue of the security which the property offers be denied to the appellee. Unless the affidavit of the sureties describes the property offered in the foregoing manner, it cannot be said to have conformed to the requirements of the law, because the property would not have been “sufficiently identified to establish the lien of the bond.” A lien being a charge, or security, or encumbrance upon property of one person, to secure some debt or obligation to another, there should be such certainty as to the particular property intended, as to leave no doubt in any one’s mind. The requirements of the law with respect to the affidavit of sureties which accompanies appeal bonds are mandatory and must be met literally. We have no authority to hold otherwise. The Court’s power to construe and interpret statutes does not go beyond giving effect to the words in the text of the particular statute ; legislative intent must be gathered from the meaning of the words used. The lawmakers must be said to have intended only what they wrote and nothing more or less, hence, the Court has no alternative but to insist upon strict compliance with the law as it was passed. In this case the law states positively that the affidavit of the sureties must contain “a description of the property, sufficiently identified in order that it might be able to establish the lien of the bond.” The affidavit accompanying the bond in this case does not contain any description of the property offered as security as aforesaid, and renders the bond defective; the bond being defective 230 LIBERIAN LAW REPORTS affords ground for dismissal of the appeal. The motion to dismiss the appeal is, therefore, granted with costs against the appellant. Motion granted.