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| Court says lifer can divorce lifer inmate |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 11/01/2004 |
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A female state inmate, in prison along with her husband for killing a cab driver in 1984, can seek a divorce on the grounds that the husband has been incarcerated for three or more years, the state's highest court says. Rhonda Covington herself is serving a 20-year-to-life sentence. The Court of Appeals ruled that the statute of limitations has not run out for when she can seek to bring a divorce action against husband Carlton Walker. She is in Bayview state prison in Manhattan. Walker is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence in Auburn state prison. According to court papers, the two were married in May 1983. In 1985, Walker was convicted of shooting and killing a taxi driver in a Queens robbery the previous year. Covington was convicted of the same crimes _ second-degree murder, robbery and criminal possession of a weapon _ two years later. Covington, 42, sought to divorce Walker in 2000 under a state law that allows people to seek divorces if their spouses spend at least three consecutive years in prison. Walker, 44, had tried to deny her request, arguing that a five-year statute of limitations on filing for divorce had expired in his eighth year in prison, in 1992. The Court of Appeals, in a unanimous ruling last Tuesday, said the three-consecutive-years-of-incarceration rule is a rolling time frame that continues for as long as a person is imprisoned. The court said in a ruling by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick that the statute of limitations expires five years after a person is finished serving their prison sentence of three years or more. Ciparick noted that the three-years-in-prison rule was adopted in New York in 1966, when the state added six new grounds for divorce to the books. Adultery had been the only grounds for divorce in the state between 1787 and 1966. The exception was added for the spouses of inmates because legislators felt they should not have to "endure the restrictions of marriage" with none of its "economic or emotional benefits," according to the court's ruling. In addition, the three-year period was set to give inmates time to win their freedom through potential appeals and to prevent the "natural but sometimes too rash inclination to dissolve a marriage" upon the conviction of a spouse, the court said. Nothing in that law intended for spouses to lose their right to someday seek divorce against inmates, Ciparick wrote. The ruling overturned two lower court decisions that denied Covington the right to seek divorce on grounds of incarceration. |
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While it may seem counter-intuitive, the more common divorce becomes, the more complicated it gets. One might expect that because about half of today's first marriages end in divorce (and around 60 percent of second marriages) the law, the process, even the outcome would become standardized, predictable even. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. StateDivorce