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Bryant v. Robledo6/30/2005
On the other hand, the Robledos respond that they are entitled to a judgment in their favor by application of Rule 36(b), Ala. R. Civ. P., and on the authority of Thomson v. Bank, 506 So. 2d 1012 (Ala. Civ. App. 1987), which relied upon this court's previous decision in Steadham v. United States Leasing Corp., 382 So. 2d 563 (Ala. Civ. App. 1980). In Thomson, we followed Evans v. Insurance Co. of North America, 349 So. 2d 1099 (Ala. 1977), in holding that the trial court had not abused its discretion in entering a judgment for a plaintiff based primarily on the admissions that had been deemed admitted. In Steadham, this court followed Evans and stated that a summary judgment or a directed verdict could be entered against a party that had failed to respond to requests for admissions; in both Steadham and Thomson, either no response or inadequate responses had been filed in an untimely manner. Thus, the dispositive legal issue that is presented is whether the rule stated in Cole is sound.
Under our law, failure to respond to a request for admissions in Alabama can have significant consequences. Pursuant to Rule 36(b), Ala. R. Civ. P., a matter is deemed admitted unless a written answer or objection is served within the applicable time frame; the duty to respond is not fulfilled by having previously responded to the complaint with a denial of every material allegation. See Breen v. Baldwin County Fed. Sav. Bank, 567 So. 2d 1329 (Ala. 1990). Thus, a total failure to respond to a request for admissions usually results in the matters specified in the request being deemed admitted. See Rule 36.1, Ala. R. Civ. P. In Crum v. SouthTrust Bank of Alabama, 598 So. 2d 867 (Ala. 1992), the appellant contended that an adverse summary judgment was improper because the bank had not demonstrated the absence of any genuine issues of material fact under Rule 56, Ala. R. Civ. P. Our Supreme Court determined that because the appellant had failed to respond to the bank's requests for admissions and because the record contained substantial evidence of the facts and contained no evidence to the contrary, the bank was entitled to a summary judgment based primarily on the admissions. Crum, 598 So. 2d at 871.
According to a long line of cases from our Supreme Court, any relief to be afforded from the consequences of tardy responses lies within the trial court's discretion. See, e.g., Bradley v. Demos, 599 So. 2d 1148 (Ala. 1992); Green Tree Acceptance, Inc. v. Doan, 529 So. 2d 201 (Ala. 1988); and Hatton v. Chem-Haulers, Inc., 393 So. 2d 950 (Ala. 1981). After extensive research into the issue, we have been unable to locate a reported decision that has reversed a trial court's judgment where late responses to admission requests were allowed or where unrefuted admissions were conclusively deemed as facts for purposes of trial or for purposes of deciding a summary-judgment motion or other dispositive motion. In fact, the Cole decision, a case that Justice Lyons has characterized in his treatise as "questionable" (1 Champ Lyons, Jr., & Ally Windsor Howell, Jr., Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure Annotated 844 (4th ed. 2004)), is the only reported Alabama case wherein a trial court allowed an affidavit or other evidentiary submission to defeat a summary-judgment motion that had been filed and was based on admissions that had previously been deemed admitted by the trial court.
Based on the above-cited legal principles, we conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in basing its summary judgment as to James Bryant on the admissions deemed admitted in December 2002. To the extent that Cole stands for the proposition that admissions can never be used by a party to establish the absence of
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