Trover, for household furniture &c. Trial by jury and verdict for the plaintiff. The evidence tended to prove that the plaintiff conveyed a farm to the defendant February 22,1916, it being understood that the plaintiff was to remove his personal property from the premises on or before April first, next. The plaintiff, owning the locks upon the barns where the property was stored, did not deliver to the defendant possession of these barns, but retained the keys.
Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 1917-11-06
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently October 1969
8 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
¶1
It was not error for the court to refuse to give the instructions requested by the defendant. Such instructions would leave out of consideration the vital fact in the case, which could be found from the evidence, namely, the cutting out and removing by the defendant of the plaintiff’s locks upon the premises, and substituting locks of his own in place thereof. This was an act of dominion over the plaintiff’s property in denial of and inconsistent with his ownership, and was, therefore, a conversion of the property.
Evans
v.
Mason,
64 N. H. 98;
Baker
v.
Beers,
64 N. H. 102;
Porell
*506
v.
Cavanaugh,
69 N. H. 364;
Knapp v. Guyer,
75 N. H. 397. The act of the defendant, being a conversion, was sufficient upon which to ground the action of trover without a demand and refusal. “A demand and a refusal are only evidence of a conversion, and a demand is only necessary when the circumstances as shown in evidence do not of themselves amount to an actual conversion.”
Porell
v.
Cavanaugh, supra.
If there had been no evidence in the case that the defendant cut out and removed the plaintiff’s locks from the barns, and put on locks of his own, then it might have been proper to have given the requested instructions; but the evidence was ample to warrant the jury in finding that the defendant committed these acts which constituted a conversion, and therefore it would have been error to have given the instructions.
