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A brazen 'pillar'

By Vince Carroll

Published November 16, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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When you look up the word "brazen" in future dictionaries, your eyes may alight on a picture of a Boulder couple named Richard McLean and Edith Stevens. McLean's mug shot in particular will deserve prominent treatment - not only because of his breathtaking indifference to the norms of a civilized community (his wife is guilty of that, too) but because he is a former judge, former mayor, former city councilman and former elected representative to the Regional Transportation District.

Yet at the very time this pillar of the community was meting out justice from his courtroom or voting on how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for the transit agency, he and his wife were blithely trespassing on property next door. Not merely trespassing, but using the land as if it were theirs.

"Plaintiffs knew the disputed property was someone else's lando and plaintiffs used the disputed property openly, continuously and notoriously for 25 years," District Court Judge James Klein concluded in an order last month whose stern words might have led you to believe he was about to punish the couple for their transgressions.

But no: The words "plaintiffs" and "disputed property" are the hints that something is amiss - that something truly bizarre is afoot. Klein was not punishing the couple at all. He was about to reward them.

His order granted McLean and Stevens about 34 percent of a 4,750-square-foot lot owned for more than two decades by Don and Susie Kirlin, who hadn't developed it but who paid taxes and homeowner fees on it during that time. The Kirlins say they'd walk by the property on a regular basis from their home down the street but never noticed their current adversaries using it.

Confused? Can a couple more or less squat on land they know isn't theirs and then go to court demanding a transfer of title when the owners move to fence them off?

They can, and they did.

"This person was supposed to be the moral compass of our community," Don Kirlin told the Boulder Daily Camera. "While this person was a sitting judge, he was trespassing on his neighbor's property with the intent of taking it away from him. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's moral."

The legal doctrine under which the Kirlins lost their property is known as "adverse possession." Not only is it apparently an ancient element of common law, you can imagine situations when it might prevent an actual injustice.

In Colorado, according to Klein's order, you can claim someone else's land if your "possession was 'actual, adverse, hostile, under a claim of right, exclusive and uninterrupted' " and lasted for 18 years. Each of those words has a legal definition, and it's important to note that the Kirlins dispute whether the definitions were actually met. But let's assume they were. What kind of people deliberately use someone else's land for a long period of time and then move to appropriate it when the owners decide the freebie has to end?

As if to salt the wound, McLean/Stevens have now requested that the court order the Kirlins to pay their legal fees.

Nine years ago, when then Senior District Judge McLean ran for the RTD board, a spokesman for Citizens for a Better RTD gushed that "his integrity is unimpeachable." Would that person have said as much if he'd known McLean and his wife were, as Klein explained the testimony, using someone else's property "on a daily basis as a footpath to their garden and deck, [and that they] gardened and entertained on it, kept their wood pile on it, and used its path to have deliveries made"?

"In this case," Klein concluded with a clairvoyant flourish, "plaintiffs' attachment to the land is stronger than the true owners' attachment."

In other words, they stole it fair and square.

Comments

  • November 16, 2007

    9:49 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    alanbl writes:

    Thank-you, Vince Carroll! Finally, someone in the print media who is willing to not equivocate on this issue.

  • November 20, 2007

    7:20 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    bthye writes:

    I can think of a few other words besides "brazen": shameless, arrogant, and disrespectful.