Who's Barge is to Blame?

I’ve been trying to sum State v. Ryan up for a week now. It's a somewhat interesting story that’s unfortunately ruined by some really arcane legal procedural stuff. 

I'll do my best.

So here’s what happened — Mr. Ryan owns a business that stores stuff, including watercraft, on some riverfront land in Milwaukee.  Back in 2005, the Department of Transportation used eminent domain to seize the property. Some wrangling ensued, Ryan refused to leave, and the DOT eventually got a court order to vamoose and take all his stuff with him.

Ryan vacated the property, but left a barge out on the river moored to a landing.  The DOT moved in and left the barge alone. About a year later the barge sunk.  Good tip for you — sinking a barge in the middle of a river is a great way to get the Department of Natural Resources really upset.

So the DNR files a forfeiture lawsuit (similar to a forfeiture you’d pay for, say, speeding, but they don’t issue a ticket first), charging Ryan with a violation of laws prohibiting blocking navigable waterways. 

Now here's the legal twist — Ryan claims the barge isn’t his, that it actually belongs to someone else, and Ryan was just storing it for him.  Although the real owner had stopped paying the storage fee, Ryan had never taken legal title to the barge through a court proceeding. He also claimed that regardless of who the owner was, the DOT actually caused it to sink through their negligence.

Now it gets less interesting, so skip to the last paragraph if you like. The problem for Ryan was that in the past he had said a few things and written a few things that made it seem like he might really own the barge.  There’s a court rule called "judicial estoppel" which basically means you can’t convince a judge that X is true, and then in a later proceeding try to claim that X is false.  The issue here was whether the statements Ryan had made were sufficient to tie his hands that way.

Turns out they weren’t. Those earlier statements were not clearly inconsistent with his current claim of no-ownership, and just as importantly, he never convinced a judge of anything with his earlier statements. 

So now after the Supreme Court case he’s free to go back and argue to the lower court that he doesn’t own the barge and can’t be forced to pay a fine for its sinking.