Source: https://familylaw.typepad.com/virginiafamilylawappeals/marriage/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:32:30+00:00

Document:
The husband in Cano v. Davidson, decided by the Virginia Court of Appeals on April 1, 2014, said he should get more than half the marital property because he had contributed more to the marriage than the wife. He had sacrificed more, by leaving his come country and leaving behind his career there, and supporting his wife while she earned her Ph.D. and advanced in her career. The trial court instead divided marital property 50/50, and the Court of Appeals affirms.
Although there is not a discussion of it in the Va. Lawyers Weekly digest of the case, this decision may turn on an important point about contributions to the marriage that litigants don't tend to notice: what matters is the benefit to the marriage from the contributions, not how much was sacrificed to produce them. Also, courts usually tend to divide marital property 50/50, and justify it by saying that each party's contributions are balanced by a different kind or mixture of contributions by the other spouse. And that is not the kind of ruling that tends to get overturned on appeal.
CHILD ABUSE/NEGLECT – CRIMINAL CHARGES – ELIGIBLE DEFENDANTS. Can a person whose only relationship to the child is “mother’s boy friend” (live-in) be prosecuted as a “person responsible” for a child who suffers neglect or abuse or both while in his care? Well he certainly can be if he is the adult whose intentional blows broke the small child’s leg. And that’s true even if the child’s actual parent was present at the time of the injury, the Court of Appeals held in Carrington v. Commonwealth, ___ Va. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d __, 26 VLW 1080 (2/14/12). This man was responsible for the child when the child “was injured,” and he had been acting in the father role by helping to feed and bathe the child and get the child to sleep at night. In fact, he had been trying to give the child a bottle when he ended up hitting the infant. Nothing in this criminal statute says a defendant who had joint responsibility for a child can’t be guilty of criminal child neglect.
CRIMINAL ISSUES – BIGAMY – DEFENSES – “IF IT’S VOID....” In what some may condemn as a triumph of law and expediency over pure reason, the Court of Appeals affirmed (probably not for the first time) rejection of a defense to felony bigamy that it doesn’t take a particularly imaginative lawyer to think of, and which may even be more appealing to the most linear and literal-minded among us. As for marrying another woman without being divorced from one’s present wife, the defendant argued that if bigamous marriages are void, then he didn’t commit any crime. Indeed, didn’t commit any act at all. The appeal to the Court of Appeals called it “legally impossible” by simple logic to be convicted of bigamy since the defendant never “married another person” as declared felonious and punishable under §18.2-362. I.e., a void act never happened, as the law understands it, so he committed no crime. Really, the Court of Appeals explained, it takes an interpretation of other Code sections which declare bigamous marriages – or “marriages” – void (such as §§20-38.1, 20-43 and 20-45) to fully understand this. What they clearly state is that the second ceremony doesn’t create a legal relationship, and that’s what the defendant criminally entered into. Thus none of the statutes declaring it void make §18.2-362 bigamy unpunishable. An Eighth Amendment argument against cruel and unusual punishment was also rejected. Cole v. Commonwealth, ___ Va. App. ___, ___ S.E.2d ___, 26 VLW 275 (8/2/11).
The Court of Appeals in the unpublished Harbison v. Harbison case at 24 VLW 1026 (1/12/10) held that a trial court properly awarded fees to a wife when deciding that because of husband’s prior marriage, making his current marriage bigamous and thus void ab initio, there could not be a divorce since there was no longer a marriage.

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