Weblog Comments

Return to the Weblog

Two More Cases I Would Have Gotten Wrong

I was a trial judge for ten years without ever being assigned to Family Law. Turns out all you have to do is deny a coupla divorces and the Presiding Judge decides you're not cut out for that assignment.  Go figure. 

Seemed to me you shouldn't need a judge to grant divorces if there wasn't an option to deny them.  I assured him that if he assigned me a few more I was confident my grants would eventually exceed my denials, but he seemed not to be reassured.  PJ's are hard to figure sometimes.

It's probably just as well.  I think maybe I'm not cut out for that kind of work.  I think you have to have a better head for money matters than I have (and fewer ex-wives).

But those of you concerned about my ability to handle them at the appellate level -- those of you who think maybe a guy who thinks exit orders are the signs on the freeway that say "Right lane must exit" maybe shouldn't be grading the papers of the Family Law judges¹ --  will be reassured by the Florida case of Craissati v. Craissati.  Judging from the handling of that case, I'm precisely the guy to be deciding family law appeals.

Here's the headline that focused my attention on Craissati v. Craissati:  Ex-wife's Alimony Cut Off Because She Has Cellmate.

"That," I thought, "is the kind of divorce case the PJ should have assigned to me - one that involves criminal law, too."  I was a prosecutor for fifteen years; send me the divorce cases that involve cellmates.

But it turns out to be harder than it looks.²  I guess I should have known.  It's a Florida case.  Nothing is easy in Florida.

Not even in Palm Beach Gardens.  Silly me; I would have thought everything is easy in Palm Beach Gardens.  Certainly it should be.  These people are richer than God.  And their money is older.

Palm Beach Gardens is the kind of place that wouldn't be satisfied banning leaf blowers; they would want to do away with deciduous trees and all those unsightly leaves. 

All you need to know about the quality of life in Palm Beach Gardens is that when they surveyed their residents about "what things are most important to you as a resident of Palm Beach Gardens, the three answers that got the highest vote totals were "streetscape aesthetics and maintenance," "street cleaning and repair," and "appearance/ maintenance of parks."  Education, fire services, police protection, and youth programs were not in the top tier.³

Now that's a sweet deal.  When the biggest problems in your life have to do with "streetscape aesthetics," you have definitely "moved on up town."

So I'm betting when the Craissatis got around to splitting the sheets, the thread count probably looked like a zip code.  I'm sure the documents were signed with Mont Blancs.

As part of their marital settlement agreement, Andrew Craissati, an investment banker, agreed to pay the erstwhile Mrs. Craissati the rather modest sum of $2,000 per month in alimony for eight years or until "the death of either party, remarriage, or cohabitation [by Patricia] with another person other than the parties' child . . . for three consecutive months or more."

Four years later, in 2005, Patricia was convicted of driving under the influence causing serious bodily injury and leaving the scene of the crime.  She was sentenced to nine years in Hillsborough Correctional Institute, in Riverview, Florida.⁴

Shortly thereafter, Andrew went back to court and pointed out that Patricia was in violation of the marital settlement agreement.  She had, after all, been cohabiting for more than three months with another person:  HER CELLMATE.

Honest.  He argued that she had forfeited her spousal support by cohabiting with her cellmate!

Since you are familiar with the quality of work turned in by the vast majority of trial court judges, you will not be surprised to hear that the trial court judge got this one exactly right.  He said being thrown in jail was not the kind of cohabitation the parties could have had in mind.  He said it might well be that Patricia - since she was now being provided room and board by the Great and Sovereign State of Florida - needed less support than had been originally set, and he was willing to hold a hearing to determine whether that was the case.  But he was not going to wipe out the support obligation entirely.

Andrew was not satisfied with that perfectly reasonable result.  He didn't just want fire and police protection and education, he wanted streetscape aesthetics and maintenance; he wanted pristine parks; he wanted trees that didn't drop their leaves every fall.  He appealed.

Justice Larry Klein, of the Fourth District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, wrote a perfectly lovely opinion in which he agreed with the trial court:  re-compute the spousal support based on Patricia's new circumstances, but don't count against her the fact she was not put into solitary confinement in the Graybar Hotel.  Short, concise, reasonable.

If only it had been the majority opinion.

That's right, two justices of the Florida Court of Appeal held that cohabitation is cohabitation.  Doesn't matter whether you chose to cohabit or had it forced upon you by the Department of Corrections. 

Doesn't matter whether you're living with a band of guerillas who kidnapped you and are holding you in the mountains east of Havana; doesn't matter if you're comatose in a semi-private hospital room; doesn't matter if you've joined the army and are living in a barracks; doesn't matter if you've gone back to school and are living in a dorm.  You forfeit your support.

Cohabitation is cohabitation. Word definition is easier than thought.

This did not convince Justice Klein⁵, and it doesn't convince me.  But two votes is all Andrew needed, and he got them.

The majority, in an opinion whose erudition took up all of two pages,⁶ explained that its decision was based almost entirely on the fact trial counsel for Patricia had conceded that her living with another person was "cohabitation."  Hard to argue with that.  The agreement says "cohabitation" and she admitted that what she was doing fit the word used in the agreement.

Brilliant.  So if you asked a vendor for a hot dog and he gave you a terrier in a trenchcoat, the Fourth District would feel the contract was perfectly executed.  No wonder they only needed three paragraphs of legal analysis:  this is a slam dunk.

What's more, in one of those three paragraphs they pointed out that "driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a voluntary act which is known to possibly result in incarceration," so they saw nothing problematic in the result they had reached.  Patricia should have known when she committed the offense that she might be incarcerated, so she has no basis now for complaining about being thrown in the pokey. 

Of course, as Justice Klein pointed out, it wasn't the incarceration that constituted cohabitation under their ruling, it was the "mere happenstance that she must share her cell with another person."

So the mistake Patricia made was not getting herself  thrown into solitary confinement every ninety days.  Had she only stabbed someone occasionally or poisoned a prison guard, she'd be collecting her check every month, no questions asked. 

Anything that got her put into administrative segregation⁷ would have solved her problem.  But was she willing to make that one little sacrifice?  Was she willing to take the one simple step that would have saved her husband and the Florida judicial system all this agida?  Noooooooooooooo.

Selfish birch. 

Certainly we can't have our courts rewarding someone for such a complete lack of foresight and cooperative spirit.  She's lucky they didn't take away her tv privileges.⁸

So I probably would have gotten that one wrong, but the reasoning is so close to the kind of thing I usually come up with that I'm sure you'll agree it proves my fitness to handle Family Law appeals.⁹

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being too critical of the Craissati majority.  These are, after all, difficult cases.  Take, for example, the case of Calbi v. Calbi, in New Jersey.¹⁰

Calbi is another spousal support issue.  New Jersey has a rule that an alimony order¹¹ can be terminated only if it can be shown the receiving party no longer needs it, or the receiving party has done something so egregious, "so violative of social norms" that it would "confound notions of simple justice" to require support.

In Calbi, the ex-husband had a somewhat better case for stopping his alimony payments than did Andrew Craissati:  Calbi's ex had killed one of the children.

That's right.  Mrs. Calbi, in a drunken rage, kicked her fifteen-year-old son to death.  As you might imagine, that made it harder for dad to sign the alimony check every month.  He tried to get his support obligation terminated on the ground it would "confound notions of simple justice" to force him to keep paying to support the woman who had beaten his child to death.

You wanna take a minute to make your own call on this one?  Does making this guy keep writing that check confound your notions of simple justice?  Does mine.

But the New Jersey Superior Court (appellate department) said "no."  They said mom "had no evil intent," had received a lenient sentence recommendation from the prosecutor (impliedly recognizing she wasn't really a bad person), was already being punished by the criminal courts, and would have to carry around the guilt from this act forever.  She shouldn't also have to support herself.¹²

The New Jersey state legislature was on this like a duck on a june bug.  Bills were introduced in both houses to provide that if you beat your child to death, your ex- doesn't have to keep supporting you.  I rather hope one of them passes; then maybe I can get my paper re-graded.

Because as it is, I got both of these wrong.  I would have continued support payments in Florida and stopped them in New Jersey.  I am - proudly - 0 for 2.

1. Hellooooo, Orange County family law judges.

2. Much like marriage.

3. "Getting rid of the 55 trashy renters who have somehow infiltrated our enclave" did not appear on the survey or I'm sure it would have been right up there with streetscape aesthetics. Can you imagine a city with only 55 renters?

4. Which has to be the most idyllic prison name in America.  Hillsborough . . . Riverview . . . Villa Park . . . Shady Canyon . . . .  They all sound like great places to live, right?

5. Justice Klein authored the chapter on appeals in the Florida Dissolution of Marriage Manual.  He also wrote the chapter on appeals in a text called Florida Proceedings after Dissolution of Marriage.  I can't tell you anything about the author of the majority opinion because the court does not claim her on its website.  But I'm pretty sure she's a judge because my own research has indicated that most states require that in their courts of appeal.

6. It would have been shorter, but the consarned statement of facts required a page and a half.

7. in case you are not a denizen of the criminal law, "ad seg" is what Andy Griffith would have called "solitary confinement" and James Cagney would have called "The Hole."

8. Apparently no truth to the rumor the court, in a separate ruling, ordered that she not be allowed to watch the television series Prison Break "or any movies dealing with that subject matter."

9. See what I mean about the kind of reasoning I usually come up with?

10. Calbi v. Calbi (2007) 396 N. J. Super. 532.  Honest, I don't make these things up.

11. Both New Jersey and Florida still use the term "alimony."  You will look in vain for a reference to spousal support in these cases.

12. My favorite part of this opinion was their directive that if dad could show that the death of his son had so decimated him that he could no longer earn a living - a possibility I, as a father, could completely understand - he could still get his support reduced on that basis.  Economics they could handle; it was compassion they had difficulty with

Posted by William W. Bedsworth on Wednesday, April 01, 2009 at 14:37 Comments (1)

Comments by Jess from United Kingdom on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 at 06:05 - IP Logged Hmm My Lord my I respectfully ask whether this is a joke (I am relying on the date of the post) because if it isn't, it is a little worrying. Maybe this is the start of a new era of strict interpretation? It made me laugh though, thank you!

Comments are now closed.

Send your comments directly to the author at William.Bedsworth at jud.ca.gov (remove spaces and add @ symbol in place of the "at").