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11th District splits on divorce property case
BENJAMIN WHITE
Legal News Associate Editor
Published: July 18, 2012
A divorce dispute surrounding a 1992 Ford Mustang divided the 11th District Court of Appeals recently as it reexamined Ohio’s marital and separate property laws.
In the majority opinion, authored on June 29 by Judge Timothy P. Cannon, the court reversed the Trumbull County Court of Common Pleas’ decision, which originally held that the appellant had relinquished her separate interest in the vehicle. The case was remanded for further proceedings despite Judge Diane Grendell’s dissent.
In 2001, appellant Susan Siefert (then named Telego) paid $7,500, $500 of which she borrowed from her future husband, Edward Siefert, for a decade-old boxy Mustang LX convertible. The next year, the couple married and began restoring the vehicle. In 2005, Susan, 25 years younger than her new husband, transferred the title of the Mustang from her name to a joint title with rights of survivorship.
Throughout the span of the Sieferts’ marriage, they spent a good deal of time and money on the Mustang’s restoration. Eventually, the modifications, which included a custom chrome-and-red 500-horsepower engine and embroidered ponies adorning the headrests, increased its value to $27,200.
Edward Siefert filed a domestic violence complaint against his wife in November 2010 and filed for divorce a week later. When dividing the couple’s property, Judge Richard James of the Trumbull Court of Common Pleas’ Domestic Relations Division determined that Susan “converted any separate property claims she may have had into a marital asset” by switching to a joint title. The result: the Mustang would be treated like any other joint asset throughout the divorce process.
Susan, who sports a red, white and blue Mustang logo tattoo on her right calf, appealed the ruling, asserting that she never meant to make a gift of her $7,500 interest in the car to her husband – and that amount should remain her personal separate interest.
Canfield attorney Charles E. Dunlap argued on her behalf that the only evidence used by the trial court to determine that she relinquished her separate interest in the vehicle was the transfer of ownership to a joint title.
Twelve years ago, the 11th District, in its decision in Frederick v. Frederick, interpreted the updated laws concerning the equitable division of marital and separate property (O.R.C. 3105.171) for the first time. Until then, the presence of both parties’ names on a joint title had implied equal ownership, intentions notwithstanding. With the updated laws and the Frederick decision, though, “a trial court may make such a finding only upon an appropriate factual context.”
In the Siefert case, Edward testified that the title transfer had been executed in conjunction with the couple’s wills – in the event of both of their deaths, the Mustang was to be bestowed to the Ford Motor Company.
The 11th District found that Edward failed to show “by clear and convincing evidence that appellant, the donor, made an inter vivos gift.” This, combined with the potential alternate purpose (estate planning) of the Mustang’s transfer, served to convince Judges Timothy P. Cannon and Cynthia Westcott Rice to reverse and remand the lower court’s decision.
Judge Diane Grendell, however, offered a dissenting opinion in which she argued that the available evidence indicated a shared ownership of the car. In other words, Judge Grendell believed that Susan Siefert had given up her separate interest in the vehicle.
First, Judge Grendell interpreted the right of survivorship contained in the Mustang’s certificate of title to imply a present ownership interest in each Siefert. She then used the concurrent estate planning involved to come to a different conclusion than her two colleagues. Since the trial court found that the couple’s wills plan to donate the car to the Ford Motor Company, Judge Grendell observed that Susan could have left the vehicle in her name to achieve the same altruistic intent. “There would be no need to provide for the contingency ‘if anything happened to us,’” she explained in her opinion.
The final evidence that Judge Grendell used in her dissenting opinion was the amount of time and money Edward invested in the Mustang’s restoration. Before taking the Mustang to car shows, the couple would use parts from Edward’s separately owned Mustang in its restoration.
“While none of these facts are necessarily determinative of the status of the Mustang as separate or marital property,” Judge Grendell wrote, “collectively they corroborate the evidence of the vehicle’s title, and competent and credible evidence supporting the lower court’s determination.”
The appellate case is cited as Siefert v. Siefert, 2012-Ohio-3037.