Court Opinion

ID: 9756241
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 21:17:54.565365+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:16.909887
License: Public Domain

CAYTON, Chief Judge,
retired (dissenting) .
It seems to me that there has been too much emphasis by the trial court (and by this court as well) on extraneous matters such as plaintiff’s former marriage and her earlier divorce obtained on the ground of nonsupport. It also seems to me that the trial court indulged in some gratuitous moralizing in arriving at its decision. I think it was of no great significance that this 28-year-old woman did not seek the approval of her parents before marrying defendant. And I think there is nothing persuasive in a legal way in the statement that she “blindly took him for better or for worse.” Of much greater significance is the unchallenged showing that in two respects defendant deliberately perpetrated fraud in inducing plaintiff to marry him. He told her he had a job when in fact he had been out of work for a long time. He told her he had an apartment already furnished in which they could live when in fact he had no such thing, but only a place they would have had to share with two unmarried couples. Additionally he said nothing about his criminal record, and this, while not heinous, was not a trifling matter. In these circumstances I think it was unrealistic to deny relief to this plaintiff on the ground “that the public has a direct interest in [the marriage] as an institution of transcendent importance to social welfare.” It was even more unrealistic to deny relief because plaintiff did not launch a premarital investigation of her husband’s financial status and criminal record. Nor is there much appeal in the trial courfls suggestion of the much less savory remedy of a suit for divorce on the ground of adultery, I would reverse.