PORTLAND, Maine — The Maine Supreme Judicial Court has declined to decide if the date a same-sex couple were married out of state is their legal wedding date in Maine or if the union only became official when this state’s gay marriage law went into effect.
Chief Justice Leigh I. Saufley on Thursday issued a one-page order dated Oct. 13 that sent the case back to District Court Judge Valerie Stanfill, who previously decided that for the purposes of the couple’s divorce, their wedding date was Oct. 14, 2008.
“The trial court in this case has sufficient guidance before it to answer the reported question,” Saufley wrote.
The justices heard oral arguments on the issue in September at the Capital Judicial Center in Augusta. Saufley then said the court was reluctant to weigh in on the question because the divorce procedure has not been completed and Stanfill has not made a decision about the division of marital property. The state supreme court rarely considers an interlocutory appeal.
“We are very reluctant to take a reported question especially when the factual disputes are not yet resolved,” she said in September.
The question arose in connection with the pending divorce of Elisabeth M. Kinney and Tanya J. Busch in order to determine the division of marital property. At stake is the equity in a Hallowell house, purchased in September 2007. The couple has no children, according to briefs filed in the case.
In a footnote in the order, Saufley cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June that made same-sex marriage legal in all states and ordered that states must recognize gay unions from other states just as they did for heterosexual couples.
Portland attorney Mary L. Bonauto, who argued that case before justices in Washington, D.C., praised the Maine high court’s decision and called it a victory for same-sex marriage in a news release issued Thursday.
“The U.S. Supreme Court wiped away any lingering effect of state anti-marriage laws to people who have pending cases or proceedings,” she said. “Marriages of same-sex couples lawfully joined are valid — period — and that rule applies to any pending civil case or proceeding.”
Bonauto, who works for Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, was co-counsel in the case before the Maine supreme court, representing Kinney.
Efforts to reach Scott Lynch, the Lewiston attorney representing Busch, were unsuccessful Thursday.
The women were married in Massachusetts well before Mainers voted to legalize the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples and to recognize gay unions performed in other states. Maine’s law went into effect on Dec. 29, 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all states in June.
In January 2013, Kinney filed for divorce in Kennebec County District Court. Judge Stanfill on Aug. 6, 2014, ruled that for purposes of the divorce, Kinney and Busch were married in 2008. Because the Maine Supreme Judicial Court had never considered the question of when same-sex marriages performed out of state became legal in Maine, Stanfill and the attorneys referred the question to the justices.
Saufley sent the case back to the lower court by a seldom used “order to discharge as improvidently granted.”
Attorney Brad Hughes of Columbus, Ohio, wrote about such orders two years ago in an issue of Ohio Lawyer.
“On relatively rare occasions, a high court in the business of deciding weighty cases may ultimately choose not to decide a given appeal, even after having deliberately chosen to accept it in the first place,” he wrote. “In these circumstances, after taking a hard, second look at the record and the briefs, the reviewing court concludes that a case that may have once seemed compelling at the discretionary review stage suddenly seems less so at the merits stage, and the court decides … to dismiss it as having been improvidently granted.”