Court Opinion

ID: 9542670
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:37:15.215887+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:08:38.477735
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Chief Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. The decision here does violence, in my opinion, to several basic legal principles because:
A. It permits the insured to break his promise stipulated to keep the insurance in force, — which condition obviously was designed to benefit the wife he was divorcing and the daughter he sired by her;1 and
B. It condones the breach of his promise to obey the court decree requiring him to keep the policy in force, obviously for their benefit; and
C. It overrides the lower court’s decision in the divorce action by ab initio, ex post facto destruction in part of the divorce decree by an unwarranted collateral attack on an existing valid judgment, thus looking askance at the res judicata concept; 2 and
*189D. It makes out of holey cloth a misty third-party beneficiary situation without a whit of language in the prior divorce decree, the stipulation entered into by the parties, or the decree in which the latter was incorporated; and
E. It assumes that there was a divisible life insurance policy, — or three distinct policies, as one may choose, to interpret the decision here: 1) the one based on a time period in which, to the then existing beneficiary, it was worth the amount due calculated as though the insured had died the instant the magic divorce decree was entered, — 2) the second, payable to his estate and/or creditors, if he died, for example ten years later, not assuming he died at the time of the decree, and without having remarried, and 3) as here, payable to a wife he might have married eight years after his divorce from the first, but two years before he actually died. To whom it would be payable for the increment on the policy during the eight years interim, is anyone’s guess, but certainly such coincidence would test the wits of the probate court, the apparent illusory beneficiaries existing during the eight year period, that might appear as ghosts, the insurance company, in light of the insured’s obvious contempt of court, resulting in his effecting an unauthorized change in beneficiary by concealing his divorce decree from the insurance carrier, the bewildered judge who may have granted the divorce, and more significantly the judge in the instant case, whose decree, in my opinion, was correct, based on the fundamentals mentioned above.
I think that the authorities cited in the main opinion in this case on appeal are not dispositive of the issues here, since this case has other aspects to it, including a binding stipulation of the parties, present here, not there, and a split-level structure based on split-up values based on an increase increment conditioned on passage of time, — present here, but not there.
I believe the trial court should have been sustained.

. Which also must be construed to be a promise not to change the beneficiary of the policy.

. Which resulted in his being in contempt of court, by changing the beneficiary.