Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday April 09 2015, @09:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the breaking-up-is-hard-to-do dept.

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."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by danmars on Friday April 10 2015, @06:52PM

    by danmars (3662) on Friday April 10 2015, @06:52PM (#168813)

    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.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Monday April 13 2015, @01:28PM

    by GeminiDomino (661) on Monday April 13 2015, @01:28PM (#169693)

    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"