Opinion ID: 2402348
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Defendant's Property Settlement Agreement From a Previous Marriage

Text: Rosemarie's final contention concerning the general magistrate's evidentiary rulings is that he erred in excluding evidence of Lance's divorce-settlement agreement relative to a previous marriage, offered to show Lance's perceived value of his separate oil and gas holdings before he married Rosemarie. It is clear from the record that the general magistrate excluded this evidence because he found it to be irrelevant. In making his decision to exclude evidence of the property settlement with Lance's first wife, the general magistrate distinguished Zaino v. Zaino, 818 A.2d 630 (R.I.2003). In Zaino, this Court affirmed a decision of the Family Court to reopen a fully executed divorce-settlement agreement and judgment. Id. at 635-36. We held that evidence of the agreement properly was before the Family Court because it was offered to prove that an exhusband fraudulently had induced his exwife to enter into the agreement when it was created. Id. at 636. In the present case, as the general magistrate pointed out, neither party alleged that he or she was defrauded with respect to how much the other party was worth. The holding of Zaino that a prior divorce settlement was admissible in court, therefore, does not apply to the present facts. Furthermore, the exclusion of evidence on grounds of relevancy is soundly within the trial justice's discretionary powers, and we will not reverse that decision absent an abuse of discretion. State v. Marini, 638 A.2d 507, 516 (R.I.1994). In this case, Rosemarie proffered the evidence of Lance's past divorce settlement to show values of interests he owned at the time of Lance's and Rosemarie's marriage in 1997. Because the settlement agreement occurred nineteen months before Lance's and Rosemarie's marriage, we perceive no abuse of discretion in the general magistrate's decision that the evidence was irrelevant to the issue of how much Lance's interests were worth at the inception of the Ruffels' marriage. The evidence, therefore, properly was excluded.