Court Opinion

ID: 9519394
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:15:52.622907+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:44:20.816172
License: Public Domain

Marilyn Kelly, J.
(concurring). This is a regrettable decision. It should be possible for this Court, acting within the law, to affirm the trial court’s ruling.
As appellee points out, exceptions have long existed to the general rule that judges in divorce proceedings may not enforce property distribution provisions through the power of contempt.
I submit that the exceptions were created in an effort to fill a serious inadequacy in the law. Persistently, one party to a divorce finds himself *5or herself in need of help from the courts to compel compliance with provisions in the judgment. He learns that alimony and child support enforcement is directly available through the divorcing judge; anomalously, however, he is obliged to commence a new and separate civil action, with all its attendant delay and expense, to force compliance with property provisions. The offending party is subject to a contempt citation from the divorcing judge should he refuse to pay alimony or child support. However, he may with impunity defy the same judge by refusing to turn over other property as ordered.
The aggrieved party, often a woman with custody over the parties’ children, is frequently in immediate need of the property awarded her for her and the children’s support or well-being. That party is also the least likely to have available funds for a separate enforcement action. The legal logic that forces her to initiate a new lawsuit before a different judge must appear to her to be extremely flawed.
Corrective legislation is needed. In the alternative, the Supreme Court could specifically extend the inherent authority which resides in the trial courts to enforce their own directives. It could interpret the statute which provides the courts’ contempt power to embrace enforcement of the property distribution provisions of divorce judgments. MCL 600.1701(g); MSA 27A.1701(g).