Ray Griggs appeals from a jury verdict establishing a boundary line in a lawsuit he filed against Juanita Fletcher and Cora Flint the defendants. Griggs asserts the trial court erred by: 1 allowing the defendants to demand a trial by jury in the middle of a bench trial; and 2 admitting into evidence a Georgia Power photograph with an overlaid drawing of the area in question. We find no merit in these claims and affirm. 1. Griggs asserts that the trial court erred by allowing the defendants to demand a jury trial after a bench trial had commenced. He asks this court to order a continuation of the bench trial as a remedy for this alleged wrong, even though a new trial before a jury has been completed. Based upon the particular factual circumstances with which the trial court was confronted, we find no error.
The record from the first bench trial shows that after the close of Griggs’s case and during direct examination of Juanita Fletcher, the trial court expressed confusion over the exact boundary lines at issue in the case. After defense counsel agreed that Griggs was making a boundary line claim not included in his complaint, the trial court stated, See now, when y’all talked to me, now my understanding the only line we were talking about is that straight line. I didn’t know we were having a problem with that one. . . . I’m going to tell you, Griggs’s counsel, I don’t recall you ever saying we were dealing with that either. I mean I’ve sat here and listened for about an hour. I can —when I do cases, I know pretty much what I’m looking for and we have never even discussed that. And I haven’t even been watching closely, listening to that because to me it wasn’t the issue. After Griggs’s counsel asserted the claim was included in his complaint, the trial court responded, “I had a pretrial conference back there and y’all didn’t argue anything about that land, now.” The trial court then ruled that it would either move forward with the bench trial and hear both issues, or allow the defendants to demand a jury trial and continue the case. The defendants accepted the trial court’s invitation to demand a jury trial.
