John and Kathleen Stamps sued Armando Rois-Mendez, seeking a declaratory judgment as to a disputed easement, and after the case was tried in September 2008 by a Fulton County jury, the trial court entered judgment for the Stampses. Rois-Mendez appealed from this judgment in 2009, but we remanded the case to the trial court because the record was incomplete. On remand, the trial court determined that Rois-Mendez had unreasonably and inexcusably failed to cause a complete transcript of the trial proceedings to be filed, even after learning of substantial omissions from the record, and pursuant to its authority under OCGA § 5-6-48, the trial court ordered that the appeal be dismissed. Rois-Mendez now appeals from the order dismissing his earlier appeal, and we affirm. Rois-Mendez initiated his first appeal on May 26, 2009 by filing a timely notice of appeal, and he filed an amended notice of appeal on June 12, 2009. In these notices of appeal, Rois-Mendez designated the whole record, including trial transcripts and exhibits but excluding the transcript of voir dire proceedings, as the record on appeal. After a transcript of the trial was filed below, the record was transmitted to our Court, and we docketed the first appeal on July 22, 2009. The Stampses soon learned, however, that all of the trial exhibits had been omitted from the record, and they moved our Court to remand the case for the completion of the record. We granted their motion and remanded the case to the trial court on September 2, 2009.
On remand, the Stampses filed a motion to dismiss the appeal, alleging that Rois-Mendez had instructed the court reporter to copy none of the trial exhibits because he did not want to pay the associated costs. The trial court set the motion for hearing on November 12, 2009, and the hearing apparently occurred, although no transcript of it appears in the record. It also appears that Rois-Mendez did not cause the omitted trial exhibits to be filed until after the November 12, 2009 hearing, more than a year after the trial of this case, more than five months after Rois-Mendez initiated his first appeal, and more than two months after our Court remanded the case because the record was incomplete. In any event, on November 18, 2010, the trial court entered an order granting the motion and dismissing the appeal. In its order, the trial court found that, when Rois-Mendez became aware of the omission of the trial exhibits from the record, “he took no steps to correct the record,” and instead “he chose to do nothing.” Rois-Mendez now appeals from the dismissal of his first appeal.
