26 Mo. 570 | Mo. | 1858
delivered the opinion of the court.
This suit was commenced in February, 1856, on the record of a judgment recovered in October, 1838, in the municipal court of the city of Alton, in Madison county, in the state of Illinois, against the defendant and William G. Pinkard. The transcript is certified, under the act of congress, by the clerk of the circuit court of Madison county, Illinois ; and the presiding judge certifies that the attestation of the clerk is in due form. No objection is taken to the form of the certificates, but to the want of power in the clerk of the circuit court to certify to the exemplification of the record of another court. The caption to the transcript is in these words : “Pleas of record in the circuit court of Madison county, state of Illinois, the same having been transferred to said circuit court from the' late municipal court of the city of Alton in pursuance of law in that case made and provided.”
Only two points are made in this court, which are, 1st, that the transcript was improperly admitted in evidence ; and, 2d, that the action was barred by limitation.
It is insisted that the record and judicial proceedings of a court of a sister state can only be proved by the attestation of the clerk of the same court that rendered the judgment; and, conceding that the clerk of a court to which the records of another have been transferred can certify to the records of the latter, yet the law authorizing the transfer must be produced.
It is manifest from the transcript that the records of the municipal court were in fact in the custody of the circuit court, for the clerk certified that they were in his keeping ; but, independent of any verity imported by his seal, the issuing of two executions from the circuit court shows that this judgment was impressed with the action of the circuit court, and, being thus adopted, became incorporated as a part of its own proceedings. It ought to be presumed that^the clerk did not certify to a falsehood, and that the circuit court did not attempt to enforce a judgment not lawfully in its custody. If a transcript of a court of record is produced from.
The first, second and third articles of the statute of limitations of 1845 do not in terms prescribe any limitation on actions founded on judgments rendered in this or any other state ; and the implication that any of the provisions of the law were intended to cover jixdgments of other states is excluded by the first section of the fourth and last article which declares that “ every judgment and decree of any court of record of the United States, or of this or any other state or territory, made or rendered after the first day of December, in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-five, shall be presumed to be paid and satisfied after the expiration of twenty years from the time of the l-endition of such judgment or decree,” &c. It was useless legislation to declaz-e that a judgment shall be presumed to be paid after the lapse of twenty years, if a period short of that time would bar an