32 Md. 498 | Md. | 1870
delivered the opinion of the Court.
These cases having been moved from the Circuit Court for Carroll county, in which they were instituted, to the Circuit Court for Frederick county, on the suggestion of Stephen R. Gore, the first-named of the defendants, the right of removal at the instance of the defendants, or any one of them, was exhausted. Either party to the cause has the right of removal, not to be exercised, however, more than once; but the term “ party,” as employed in the Constitution, Article 4, section 8, and the Act of 1868, ch. 180, to regulate and give force to the Constitutional provision, when applied to civil causes, must be taken in a collective and representative sense, where there are more persons than one as plaintiffs or defendants, and, therefore, as there can be no severance, all applications to remove in such cases must be taken as made on behalf of all the persons constituting the party — plaintiffs or defendants, as the case may be. Any other construction would work the greatest inconvenience, if not, in many cases, a total defeat of all trial. For, if there should happen to be more individual defendants to a cause than there are judicial circuits in the State, (a thing of not unfrequent occurrence,) and each defendant had a separate and consecutive right of removal, as is claimed in the present instance, by electing to remove to a different circuit from that in which the cause might be at the
Orders reversed.