Pare v. Harmony House, Inc. (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-066-17)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports. If you find a typographical error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us SJC-12169 WARREN L. PARE vs. HARMONY HOUSE, INC. Supreme Judicial Court, Superintendence of inferior courts. May 3, 2017. The petitioner, Warren L. Pare, appeals from a judgment of a single justice of this court denying his petition pursuant to G. L. c. 211, § 3. We affirm. The record before us is scant, but, as best we can tell, the respondent, Harmony House, Inc., purchased Pare’s former home at auction and then commenced a summary process action in the Housing Court to secure possession of the home. After a judgment in Harmony House’s favor, Pare filed a motion to waive the appeal bond, pursuant to G. L. c. 239, § 5, which was allowed. Harmony House appealed from that decision to a single justice of the Appeals Court. After a hearing, the Appeals Court single justice remanded the matter to the Housing Court for a determination of the amount of use and occupancy instalment payments that Pare should make to Harmony House while his appeal from the summary process judgment was pending. When Pare subsequently sought to appeal from the single justice’s decision to a panel of the Appeals Court, a different single justice struck the notice on the basis that there is no right of appeal to a panel in the circumstances here presented.[1] Pare then filed, in the county court, a document entitled “Application for Direct Appellate Review,” which the single justice treated as a G. L. c. 211, § 3, petition, and denied. In his appeal to this court, Pare argues that Harmony House, Inc., had no right to appeal from the waiver of the appeal bond and that the Appeals Court single justice therefore had no jurisdiction to hold a hearing on the matter or to issue any kind of order to the lower court. The record that Pare has supplied to us is, as we have said, scant, and the record before the single justice was even more so. It was Pare’s burden, as the petitioner, “to create a record — not merely to allege but to demonstrate, i.e., to provide copies of the lower court docket entries and any relevant pleadings, motions, orders, recordings, transcripts, or other parts of the lower court record necessary to substantiate [his] allegations — showing both a substantial claim of violation of a substantive right and that the violation could […]