PORTLAND, Maine — The Maine Supreme Judicial Court has used one of the state’s highest profile cases to address a little-known blindspot in case law.
A 2014 fire at a two-unit home on Noyes Street in Portland claimed the lives of six people and became the deadliest blaze in Maine in nearly four decades.
The subsequent scramble among victims’ families to lay claim to landlord Gregory Nisbet’s money and assets uncovered a somewhat esoteric gap in state rules and case law.
But with the Law Court’s precedent-setting decision Tuesday, that gap is now closed.
The dispute centered around which family should be first in line for payouts should the landlord be found liable for the deaths. Estates for five of the six victims have filed wrongful death lawsuits, and Nisbet also faces six counts of manslaughter in the case.
The family of 29-year-old victim Steven Summers was the first to file a claim with the court in the aftermath of the blaze. But it did so using what’s known as ex parte attachment, one that’s not made public until after the defendant — in this case, the landlord — goes through the usually routine process of challenging it.
Ex parte attachments are secretive because they’re intended to lock up a defendant’s assets without forewarning, in cases in which the claimants are worried the people they’re suing would otherwise hide away money and property to avoid having to give it up.
But in the Noyes Street case, the landlord never challenged the ex parte attachment in court, so the claim was granted and remained under-the-radar. When families of other victims filed for their attachments more than two months later, they complained that, had they known about the Summers family claim, they would have stepped forward to challenge it themselves and make their cases for priority billing.
The other families also argued the ex parte nature of the Summers family attachment was unjustified and never should have been sought to begin with, saying Nisbet was no threat of squirreling away assets.
Responding to the other families’ complaints, the Superior Court threw out the ex parte attachment and with it, the Summers family’s place at the front of the line for payouts.
That decision was appealed by the Summers family all the way up to the state’s highest court, where Chief Justice Leigh Saufley noted that, remarkably, the Maine law book never anticipated that an ex parte attachment would go unchallenged by the defendant.
Does a secret claim become invalid just because nobody shows up to fight it and, by extension, make it public?
Nobody had the answer to that question until today.
In a ruling penned by Justice Ellen Gorman, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found that the Summers family’s claim was no less valid because it was done in secret, vacated the lower court ruling to the contrary and restored the Summers family’s place at the front of line.
