BY ORDER OF THE SUPREME COURT, THIS OPINION HAS BEEN REDESIGNATED A MEMORANDUM

This case will tell you a little about renewal of judgments and a lot about how grateful you are that there are insurance companies in the world.

The members of a partnership sued each other.  Judgment was entered on July 18, 2001.

After its entry, the judgment debtors moved to amend the judgment to delete one cause of action. The court granted their motion and on January 16, 2002 entered a new judgment, still against the debtors but eliminating the one cause of action. In May 2002 the debtors filed Chapter 7; the Bankruptcy Court ruled the debt non-dischargeable. The creditor then (by this time it was 2004) garnished. The debtors responded with a Rule 60(c) motion arguing that they should be severally, not jointly, liable. The trial court granted the motion, vacated the judgment, and entered a new one. The creditor appealed. The debtors filed Chapter 13 to stay the appeal. Eventually, the Bankruptcy Court dismissed it. The Court of Appeals  (now it was 2007) ruled in the creditor’s favor, reinstating the joint-liability judgment.

In May 2008 the creditor again filed writs of garnishment. The debtors moved to quash them, arguing that the 2001 judgment had never been renewed. Their motion was granted, resulting in this appeal.

The creditor made three arguments – that the bankruptcy proceedings extended the time for renewal, that garnishment was an “action on the judgment” effecting renewal, and that  the fact that the judgment was vacated extended the time for renewal.

The Court of Appeals made short work of the first two. Well, actually, not-short-enough work. Rather labored work, really. The prose that appears over this judge’s name is often wise but rarely graceful.

As to the last argument, the court pointed out – or, rather, chugged to a conclusion about – a couple of things. First, the January 2002 judgment was just as much a judgment as the July 2001 judgment, so the renewal period is calculated from the latter. Second, when that judgment came up for renewal it couldn’t be renewed because it had been vacated. The court ruled that vacating the judgment and then reinstating it extended the period for its renewal by the number of days it had been vacated.

So, the creditor won and can continue the quest to collect money awarded almost eight years ago.

Here is another in the seemingly never-ending series of notice-of-claim cases, this one with various types of malpractice thrown in.

Beynon had a car accident with a State of Arizona vehicle. The State sent one of its adjusters to his home. The adjuster brought a Notice of Claim form and “assisted” Beynon in filling out a claim for $10,000 for vehicle repair and medical bills. (This notice was made out in the name of the owner of the car Beynon was driving; why the adjuster prepared Beynon’s personal-injury claim in the name of an uninjured owner isn’t explained in the opinion, apparently being left as an exercise for the cynical.) The adjuster presumably then took the form with him, though he opinion doesn’t say.

Beynon then went to his chiropractor. The chiropractor (whose Patient Information form revealed – if it was like any kind of chiropractor’s form we’ve ever seen – that there was a claim against the State) told Beynon that his treatment would be expensive. The chiropractor – helpful fellow – just happened to have a Notice of Claim form of his own, which Beynon filled out with the chiropractor’s “assistance.” (Shame on you for thinking UPL; he was just a friendly guy trying to “assist.”) The new notice – this time in Beynon’s name – said that the State car had made a U-turn in front of him and asked for $50,000. The chiropractor faxed this new notice to the State’s adjuster.

Ten months later, the adjuster having made promises but no payment, Beynon hired an attorney. The attorney let the statute of limitations run, then sent the client a letter cancelling the fee agreement because liability was debatable and the case wasn’t worth the lawyer’s time (we paraphrase only slightly).  Beynon hired a new lawyer to sue him.

The defense couldn’t deny that the statute had been missed but eventually thought to argue that the notice of claim was insufficient and therefore Beynon had no valid claim anyway. The trial court granted summary judgment; Division Two, despite having read Backus v. State, affirmed.

The holding here is that a notice of claim must state facts that explain or justify the injuries and damages, not just liability. What and how much it says about them is completely up to the claimant (that’s Backus) but since Beynon’s notice didn’t say anything at all about them it was no good.

The notice was also ineffective, said the court, because it was not served on the Attorney General as the statue requires. Given the circumstances, there is a great deal that Beynon’s new attorney could have said about this but he apparently didn’t.

He also didn’t argue until appeal that the old attorney should have settled the case before the statue ran. The court rejected it for that reason, though the opinion suggests that the attorney knew that there was a problem with the notice and that he could have settled the claim.

So, despite Backus, the notice-of-claim statute can be a “gotcha” anyway, at least when combined with two or three layers of mistakes.

This is not a bad opinion, and we will assume that it is legally correct, but it does something that bothers us about many criminal opinions.

The case holds that a criminal restitution order can’t be entered until the end of the sentence/probation (because that’s what the statute says) and that doing so before then is fundamental error (because now that such orders bear interest an early entry constitutes an excessive sentence).

That’s about it. So why does the opinion tell us what the crime was, how Lewandowski acted at the scene, what color truck he was doing drugs in, what the evidence of his drug use was, and how he fled and was captured after doing a typical dumb-criminal thing? None of that has anything to do with the holding, which involves issues of law.

Criminal opinions do this all the time. No matter what the issue on appeal, we get all the lurid details. This is a waste of the court’s time and of ours. And in some cases it blurs the point of the opinion.

Some opinions, of course, have to do it; we’re not talking about those. We know why opinions in capital cases, for example, spend pages detailing the evidence. The opinion must say as much as the issues need. But they shouldn’t say more.

We don’t know whether it makes things better or worse that the court in this case saw the problem. It issued a memorandum opinion on some other issues raised in the case (under the rule we just chided CA1 for ignoring), an opinion that probably did require discussion of the crime; for the published opinion, it said, it was stating facts “to provide a context for our discussion.”

Context? What context? The context for the court’s discussion was the sentencing, which the text mentions so briefly that more had to be added in a footnote. How does the arresting officer’s name or the color of the truck or the size of the bag of crystal meth, for example, give any context to anything else in the opinion?

Sometimes it seems that opinions are written to a template. The template apparently contains a heading called “Facts and Procedural Background” and somebody must get points for plugging stuff in under that heading – even though whoever’s doing it has no conception of what facts or procedural background ought to be there. We don’t necessarily criticize the use of templates but they ought not to be a substitute for thought.