AMENDMENT TESTS LOOM: From the Deseret Morning News

...Newly passed Amendment 3 takes effect Jan. 1, but already Utah lawyers are exploring ways to employ this legal standard -- based on its second sentence, which prevents the legal recognition of any domestic union that is the same, or substantially equivalent, to a marriage.

Salt Lake attorney Mary Corporon recently filed a motion for a male client who contends that Amendment 3 makes it unconstitutional to enforce a court protective order that his former live-in girlfriend got from a judge.

..."If you have two people who occupy the same space together, a man and a woman in a romantic relationship, and the court steps in and says, 'One of you gets to occupy the space you have and the other doesn't,' that begins to look like a marriage breaking up and the temporary protective orders issued in divorces," Corporon said. ...

Attorney Monte Stewart, co-chairman of Utahns for a Better Tomorrow, which supported the amendment, said arguments such as Corporon's are bad ones that will ultimately fail.

"Lawyers representing clients, especially in criminal cases, are obligated to throw up just about everything and anything they can think of," Stewart said. "That's just the nature of the system. As they throw these arguments up, one by one, they will be rejected." ...

Corporon -- who did not support Amendment 3 -- is nonetheless using it to represent her client by contending that a protective order in essence grants property rights to the girlfriend because the order forbids the man from coming into the apartment they shared. But this couple cannot have "substantially equivalent" rights as married people because they were never wed, she argues. ...

Stewart, however, said lawyers who present such legal defenses probably have two motives -- to defend a client and their own position against Amendment 3.

"A number of lawyers said it's going to cause unforeseen consequences," Stewart said. "They have a personal and a vested interest in getting to the point they can say 'I told you so.'" ...

But Corporon predicts the amendment now will be used in ways that could affect criminal, family and probate law, as well as such things as debt collection.

"We will all start to fight out one case at a time what Amendment 3 means," Corporon said.

"I know from 25 years of doing family law there are court orders out there which order somebody to pay alimony to somebody under a common law marriage decree and divorce. Somebody who's ordered to pay alimony would have a huge incentive to say, 'You can no longer enforce your decree against me because it's unconstitutional, so I'm going to stop writing my alimony checks,' " Corporon said.

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posted by Eve at 3:39 PM VOTE

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