JACKSON - Money can't buy love, but Mississippi is still making people pay for stealing affection.
Missouri's Supreme Court recently struck down that state's alienation of affection law as archaic, but Mississippi's high court has upheld the right to seek damages from love thieves.
"It's still a viable cause of action in civil cases," Mississippi Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Compretta said.
In fact, as recently as 2001, state courts have approved damages as high as $100,000 to compensate a spouse for the loss of love.
Compretta said Mississippi courts aren't bound by the Missouri ruling in dealing with alienation of affection cases, but the ruling could be cited as a reason for denying such cases if the courts chose to.
There is no actual law on the books in Mississippi dealing with alienation of affection. Rather, it is a common law tort. It would take a court ruling or action by the Legislature to eliminate it as a cause of action.
States increasingly have been abolishing alienation of affection torts, which have been around since 1864 and were based originally on the view that a wife was the property of her husband. Later, the laws were expanded to allow wives equal right to sue for the loss of affection.
Today, courts and legislatures in all but seven states have abolished the use of these lawsuits: Besides Mississippi, the other states that still allow them are Illinois, Hawaii, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota and Utah.
A North Carolina appeals court in late June upheld a $500,000 punitive judgment in a case in which a man sued his wife's former college sweetheart for having an affair with the woman.
Interestingly, Mississippi's Supreme Court in 2001 abolished another so-called "heart balm" tort when it ruled that plaintiffs can't bring so-called criminal conversation cases - seeking damages because of adultery.
But that same year, the high court declined on a 7-1 decision to abolish the alienation of affection tort on the grounds that the "marital relationship was an important element in the foundation of society and to abolish tort of alienation of affection would, in essence, send the message that the Supreme Court was devaluing the marital relationship."
The lone dissenting justice, Chuck McRae, wrote that it was archaic to "put a price tag on the heart: and that the "judicial system cannot be called upon to make one spouse love another."
Unlike in criminal conversation cases, plaintiffs seeking damages for alienation of affection don't have to prove that the defendant had sexual intercourse with the plaintiff's spouse.
"You don't have to prove adultery - with or without the act of intercourse, there can be alienation of affection," said N. Shelton Hand Jr., a law professor at Mississippi College and an expert on Mississippi family law.
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