Clark v. Clark
| Decision Date | 05 February 1935 |
| Docket Number | No. 42694.,42694. |
| Citation | 258 N.W. 719,219 Iowa 338 |
| Parties | CLARK v. CLARK. |
| Court | Iowa Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Appeal from District Court, Van Buren County; Elmer K. Daugherty, Judge.
An action to declare illegal and void from the beginning an alleged marriage between the plaintiff and the defendant. The district court dismissed the petition, and plaintiff appeals.
Modified and affirmed.
Calhoun & Calhoun, of Keosauqua, for appellant.
George R. Buckles, and J. W. Newbold, both of Keosauqua, for appellee.
Briefly stated, this action arose from the following facts:
The plaintiff and the defendant were both residents of Van Buren county, Iowa. At the time in controversy, the plaintiff was about nineteen years of age and the defendant about sixteen years of age. On the 28th day of January, 1933, these parties went through a marriage ceremony in the city of Memphis, in the state of Missouri. On the 4th of June, 1933, a baby was born to the defendant, and in August following this action was brought in the Van Buren county district court praying the court to find and determine that said marriage was illegal and void from the beginning, and that it be annulled and decree entered accordingly. The basis of the action was the claim that the plaintiff was not the father of defendant's child, and that said marriage was brought about by the fraudulent representations of the defendant, in that she represented immediately before the marriage that her unborn child was plaintiff's child.
The case was tried and the petition of plaintiff dismissed; hence this appeal.
At the threshold of the case, we are confronted with a rather anomalous situation. The prayer of the petition is that the marriage be annulled and held void and illegal from the beginning.
Section 10486 of our Code specifies the grounds on which a marriage may be annulled. None of the divisions of said section provides for the annulment of a marriage in case of fraud, or in case the wife is pregnant with child by a stranger at the time of the marriage. Section 10476 provides the grounds for obtaining a divorce, and the material part of the section reads as follows: “* * * And also when the wife at the time of the marriage was pregnant by another than the husband, of which he had no knowledge. * * *”
It is apparent, therefore, that had the action here been brought for a divorce, as specified in the last-named section, and the evidence was sufficient to sustain it, the plaintiff would be entitled to such divorce. But the plaintiff insists that his action is not brought under either of these sections of the Code, but is an action in equity on the ground that marriage is a civil contract that can be set aside in equity on the ground of fraud, the same as any other contract. He bottoms his proposition on three of the former decisions of this court, the first being Wier v. Still, 31 Iowa, 107. The technical question before us at this point is not raised in the Wier Case, that is, whether an action of this kind will lie. We there said:
“We are not prepared to deny that in certain cases, not expressly provided for in the statute, courts may declare void the marriage contract.”
In that case the prayer was that the marriage be declared void and annulled. The court dismissed the plaintiff's petition and that action was affirmed in this court.
In the case of Shaw v. Shaw, 92 Iowa, 722, 61 N. W. 368, 369, the question arose on an application for allowance of temporary alimony, and the defendant claimed that the marriage was procured through fraud and threats of the plaintiff and her relatives and friends, and further pleaded a divorce obtained in Dickenson, Stark county, N. D., and also that the plaintiff secured the defendant's consent to said marriage by false representations and charges that he had seduced her, and so forth, and that under threat of prosecution for seduction he was induced to marry the plaintiff; and that prior to said marriage the plaintiff was a woman of loose character and unchaste, and was then pregnant by another man. It was held that, so far as these proceedings were concerned, the North Dakota decree...
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