Court Opinion

ID: 9529326
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:49:48.465875+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:44.407682
License: Public Domain

*1154URBIGKIT, Justice,
dissenting.
This is the third time Susan Marie Moore has asked for justice from the Wyoming judiciary. Again, it is denied. I propose that it is high time for us to start over. We could ignore the established status of Jerry Wayne Moore’s family, the ex parte contacts with trial judges, and the decision making by attribution of association to only one party and simplistically determine how justice has been served for Mrs. Moore, as she has been in litigation with overwhelming odds against her.
In Moore v. Moore, 809 P.2d 261 (Wyo.1991) (Moore I), Mrs. Moore lost custody of her daughter despite clear unethical conduct by the trial court with the decisional process unquestionably heavily weighed against her because of the name of the family of Mr. Moore, and lost the appeal because of the name of the person with whom she had briefly engaged in an extramarital affair. This came by resolution in the decision to take custody away from Mrs. Moore, who the evidence showed to have an unblemished record of care for her young daughter and demonstrated that Mr. Moore was emotionally unstable and a developing alcoholic.
One is deeply tempted to believe, with recognition of what has happened to Mrs. Moore, that we should all be reminded that he who is without blame should only then cast the first stone (if ever). My concern in my dissent in Moore I has not since been ameliorated by the passage of time nor by the continued course of events of oppression against the nearly defenseless mother.
In Moore v. Moore, 809 P.2d 255 (Wyo.1991) (Moore II), this court found that the same trial judge, now departed from this state, was in error after awarding the least removable property in the settlement possible to Mrs. Moore (a porto barn and horses needing feed) and then granting a contempt citation against Mrs. Moore for failure to remove what little portion of the division of property she was granted when she had no proper place for their relocation and no money.
Finally, we now get the case back again based upon the further failure of Mrs. Moore to remove that modest property she was awarded in a timely manner resulting in an agister lien against her in behalf of Mr. Moore who was awarded the ranch property and most assets in the divorce. This lien occurs when an accounting and proper resolution of the divorce decree division, in itself, has not yet been accomplished by final payment by Mr. Moore to Mrs. Moore for certain items of ranch produce to which she should have been entitled. I am not so sure how a ranch wife who is divorced by her abusive husband loses her child, is thrown off of the ranch and then, when she leaves within those circumstances, can be negligent in failure to immediately relocate her horses in the face of a lien that has been established by the divorcing husband as an adjunct to the divorce litigation.
Obviously, justice has still never been achieved for Mrs. Moore. I do not believe the monthly charge was reasonable, that the lien was proper, or absolution of an effective conversion was justified by granting the co-litigant a lien for retention of her division of the property.
As we get to this decision, what is determined? A joinder with the yet pending divorce issues was denied so that Mrs. Moore was faced with not one but two continuing lawsuits. This is true even though the events were clearly conjunctive and intrinsic to the divorce proceeding. We still have, waiting in the wings, identical issues of a character not completely discernable from these three records involving questions of Mr. Moore’s duty, apparently yet uncompleted, to provide an accounting to Mrs. Moore.
I dissent in denied justice here. I find gross abuse of discretion in the denial of joinder in permitting completely identical subjects to be divided into separate litiga-tive processes and fail to find a proper legal basis for the original or later establishment of a lien under the circumstances demonstrated in this record. With issues here presented that should have remained for composite resolution in the divorce court, we have only magnified the problems and further diminished any opportuni*1155ty for fairness and equivalency to be achieved by Mrs. Moore.
I consequently dissent and unhappily anticipate that this case will sometime hereafter reappear as Moore IV. Custody of children, division of property, enforcement of a fair or unfair property division, arrangement for post-divorce decree possession and responsibility for livestock are intrinsic factors in a single transaction that cannot be segmented like electoral campaign promises which vary day-by-day.
Justice has not been a visitor to the person or abode of Susan Marie Moore in this tragedy of divorce court litigation.
I respectfully dissent.