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Ending a marriage is never easy, but Kelly Clay reports at ReadWrite that things just got easier as Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper has granted 26-year-old Ellanora Baidoo permission to serve papers to her elusive husband via a Facebook message. Invoking the social network was a last resort. Husband Sena Blood-Dzraku's whereabouts in the real world were unknown. But because he communicated with his estranged wife via phone calls and Facebook, Baidoo knew where to find him online. Justice Cooper says the "advent and ascendency of social media," means sites like Facebook and Twitter are the "next frontier" as "forums through which a summons can be delivered." Previously, if you couldn't find a defendant, you had to leave the notice at a last-known address or publish it in a newspaper, and there was no guarantee the defendant would know about it.
Before Cooper agreed to her using Facebook, Baidoo had to prove the Facebook account belongs to her husband, and that he consistently logs on to the account and would therefore see the summons. Attorney Andrew Spinnell says he has contacted Blood-Dzraku twice on Facebook, but has yet to hear back. If Blood-Dzraku refuses the summons, Spinnell says the judge can move forward with a "divorce by default" for his client. "She's not asking for any money," says Spinnell, "She just wants to move on with her life and get a divorce."
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:09PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:24PM
To avoid a... divorce? Apparently not even one where money is at stake?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:29PM
To avoid being served a summon
Short term thinking much?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snow on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:32PM
I always think long term. I'm on my first marriage, but already planning my third divorce!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:37PM
Careful though with the long term thinking, some may end of not marrying even a first time due to the rational undecidability of the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:44PM
Are there any upsides to marriage for men?
Why is it acceptable under the Equal Protection clause that the male partner is responsible for the lifestyle maintenance of the female partner after the partnership is over? Is this archaic thinking that women are damaged goods after a divorce?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by danmars on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:57PM
It often goes the other way in the case that the wife is the breadwinner. So I would say the answer to your question is "no".
http://ideas.time.com/2013/05/16/the-de-gendering-of-divorce-wives-pay-ex-husbands-alimony-too/ [time.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @10:31PM
Alimony is nonsense anyway. Get a job like everyone else has to or find a way to support your current lifestyle (or downgrade it if it is too costly and extravagant). There are also social safety nets if people are in real trouble. I don't see why people should be punished just for getting a divorce and having a decent job.
(Score: 1) by Bacon Bits on Friday April 10 2015, @08:54PM
That's an extremely naive outlook.
When you're married, there's often a choice about where to live, how to raise children, etc. and since the choices are made as a unit, usually benefiting one partner's career to the detriment of another's. Now, the way careers work, the longer you're in one, the higher your salary. if you take, say, 10 years off to raise children, you're not just out 10 years' salary. You're out the salary, the experience, and the higher salary you would be being paid. Punishing someone because they acted in good faith during a marriage and sacrificed their career for the sake of their partner's career and the marriage as a whole is not fair.
Alimony is an attempt to correct the fact that the partner who was still working enjoyed significant benefits which allowed him or her to spend additional time and effort on his or her career because his or her spouse was there to support him or her. That career would not be as successful or lucrative without that spouse there. Nobody who's been in a loving, supportive marriage would deny that fact. That support has real, tangible value, even though it's not a paid occupation. As a society, we recognize how valuable spouses are towards producing a better society for today as well as often raising our children, and, in an attempt to encourage men and women to devote their lives to someone else's career offer alimony as compensation in the event the marriage dissolves. It is, in effect, unmarried insurance.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by danmars on Thursday April 09 2015, @10:35PM
Okay, he asked more than 1 question.
Are there any upsides to marriage for men? Yes.
Why is it acceptable under the Equal Protection clause? It is more-or-less equal, that's why.
Is this archaic thinking that women are damaged goods after a divorce? No.
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Friday April 10 2015, @02:32PM
Are there any upsides to marriage for men? Yes.
Such as..?
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 2) by danmars on Friday April 10 2015, @06:52PM
Read my previous link - Alimony goes both ways, if your wife ends up making a lot of money.
There are definitely tax benefits - My girlfriend and I live together and only I work at this time - if we got married, we'd have significantly less money taken away in taxes.
Inheritance differences, of course. If your wife dies, you don't lose money. If you're not married, money you inherit from her is taxed. (That's why that's a big battleground for same-sex marriage.)
Apart from finances, there's the typical hospital stuff. You can make decisions for each other without power-of-attorney.
These reasons illustrate a weird incentives system to encourage marriage, but that's the way things are right now.
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Monday April 13 2015, @01:28PM
Fair enough, but the tax breaks aren't nearly worth it, IMO, considering what you have to lose by metaphorically giving someone a gun to point at your head. And the hospital bit is trivial to fix: just sign the form appointing her MPOA.
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:02PM
It often goes the other way
The reason it is news worth enough to appear in TIME is because it is the exception to the rule. A novelty.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:26PM
The reason it is news worth enough to appear in TIME is because it is the exception to the rule. A novelty.
A difference without a meaning. So you agree that, according to the legal system, men are entitled to alimony.
There's better man law to complain about anyway. According to the TIME link, now that men are receiving alimony there is talk to abolish it. That's at least amusingly hypocritical.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:27PM
It happened to a friend of mine in Boston. She had been a stay-at-home mother for over a decade, but the court said she was capable of working so his alimony was reduced by the amount she could reasonably earn given her education level and prior work experience as an engineer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday April 10 2015, @05:11AM
Is this archaic thinking that women are damaged goods after a divorce?
No, it is more the opposite. Really, who want a used husband? Ick!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @05:01PM
My guess is that its an overcompensation for misogyny, which is still just as widespread as always. If misogyny ever goes away, nonsense like this should too.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday April 09 2015, @10:33PM
The Kasparov-Casanova.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:57PM
There are plenty of reasons to avoid FB but this isn't one, nor is it surprising. In the absence of any way to communicate with the other party, the Court would have allowed service by publication -- a notice placed in the want ads of a local paper. Nobody reads want ads anymore -- there is absolutely no way that is going to provide actual notice to the other party in the suit.
The ruling here to allow notice via Facebook has a much better chance of actually providing notice to the other party in the absence of other more definite means of contacting this guy (no known address), so the truth is, this ruling is defendant friendly because he has a greater chance of having his side heard, rather than just losing by default on the legal fiction that a want-ad posting provided him notice he needed to defend his interests.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday April 09 2015, @10:42PM
Service via newspaper is reserved for those cases where you don't know who to notify. (Unknown creditors of a deceased person, unknown heirs, etc.) It is a judicial last resort, and act of desperation.
This is not that.
In this case, they know who the person is. They can find out approximately WHERE the person is via phone records.
Unless FB is now as reliable as a deputy sheriff or process server, and if FB is willing to certify that the person signed in and actually had the message displayed, I just don't see how this flies.
Email is still not widely accepted as a valid service of process method [ibls.com]. With fraudsters sending "Mandatory Court Appearance" spam by the truck load, it is not likely that email will ever become valid.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2015, @11:20PM
Email doesn't have any authentication of the sender. Facebook can provide that for process servers if they wanted to.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Friday April 10 2015, @02:13AM
Sorry, you are not correct. Service by publication is used for many situations when personal service is not possible on a known person for some reason. The rules differ by state, but here is the statute for Washington:
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=4.28.100 [wa.gov]
You'll notice that it lists many circumstance where you know _who_ the defendant is, but don't know _where_ he or she is.