Marital Property

The Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed an irreconcilable-differences divorce decree, upholding a proportional time-of-employment method for splitting a pre-marital IRA (40% marital based on twelve of thirty employment years falling within the marriage), classifying an anniversary diamond ring as the recipient spouse’s separate property, and rejecting a Rule 59 challenge based on post-trial home-sale evidence that did not exist at the time of hearing.

The Mississippi Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the property division in a 40-year marriage, holding that the chancery court committed reversible error by attributing $290,000 in cash value to Betty Sullivan’s term life insurance policies over her uncontradicted trial testimony and by including post-demarcation assets in the marital estate, and that Rule 59(a) required the court to correct that manifest error when documentary proof was provided on reconsideration.