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Cassels v. Pal2/9/2001
The parties are at odds over the sale of a house coupled with an agreement for the sellers' repurchase of the house under certain terms and conditions. The sellers, Dr. Kanai Lal Pal and his wife Padma Rani Pal, as plaintiffs, won a jury verdict, and the trial court entered a judgment on it against Samuel Jones Cassels and his wife Martha B. Cassels, the buyers, as defendants, for $328,150 on a claim of breach of contract and $25,400 on a claim of conversion. The Casselses appeal this judgment, and the Pals cross-appeal an adverse judgment as a matter of law entered by the trial judge on the Pals' fraud claim before he submitted the other two claims to the jury. We reverse the judgment against the Casselses and remand this cause. We affirm the judgment as a matter of law entered against the Pals on their fraud claim.
The Pals are natives of India . They and their two sons are visiting the United States on visas. While the record reveals that the Pals speak only broken English, the Pals do not claim any difficulty in reading and comprehending written English or in hearing and comprehending spoken English. The Pals are both well educated.
Before the inception of the transaction and dispute between the Pals and the Casselses, the Pals had bought, for a price of $30,0000, a house in Montgomery from owners not involved in this litigation. The Pals used the house as a residence for their two sons, who were students. The Pals themselves lived somewhere else, not material to this litigation.
When the Pals developed a need for some money, one of their sons introduced them to Mr. Cassels, who agreed, in effect, to broker a bank loan for the Pals, secured by a mortgage on the house, and to manage the house as rental property for the Pals to repay the bank loan. The form of the transaction was a sale of the house by the Pals to the Casselses and an agreement for the Pals to repurchase the house from the Casselses under certain terms and conditions. Coordinately with the Pals' sale of the house to the Casselses, the Casselses borrowed $25,900 from Central Bank; mortgaged the house to Central Bank to secure the loan; and directed Central Bank to pay $20,000 of the loan proceeds to the Pals, to apply $4,356.70 of the loan proceeds to discharge a debt owed by the Casselses themselves, and to apply the remainder of the loan proceeds to the closing costs. The application of the $4,356.70 to discharge the Casselses' own debt appears to be their major benefit from the entire transaction.
The Pals' sons vacated the house and the Casselses rented the house to various tenants, for rentals ranging between $350 and $450 per month. From these rentals the Casselses paid the monthly installments on the note to Central Bank and, according to the Pals' own complaint, also paid for "repairs in the approximate amount of $5,000" and had a "negative cash flow ... of approximately $3,500," an amount the Pals assert in their complaint is "disputed" but concede was paid from the rentals.
In October 1995, after the Casselses had collected about $38,000 in rentals, and when the mortgage note still required about seven years of monthly installments, the Pals demanded the reconveyance of the house to the Pals, and the Casselses refused the demand. The record does not contain evidence of any other details or terms of the demand or the refusal, although the Pals, through counsel, pleaded and argued that the Casselses counterdemanded that the Pals pay the Casselses an additional $15,000 or $20,000 for the reconveyance.
The Pals sued the Casselses. The parties drafted, and the trial court entered, a pretrial order, which states the Pals' claims in these words:
"Count O
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