Was it Correcting a Mistake or Modifying a Divorce Decree?~3 min read

The New Hampshire Supreme Court recently issued an order on In the Matter of Warren Jackson and Jean Jackson, Case No. 2024-0242. The parties had a long-term marriage and Husband filed for divorce in October 2020. Prior to the Final Hearing, Wife filed two Motions for Contempt. One of the Motions claimed that Husband did not comply with mandatory financial disclosure under Rule 1.25-A, and the other claimed that Husband had removed personal property from the marital home and refused to return it. A Final Hearing was held in July 2022 and a Final Decree was issued in December 2022. With regard to the Motion for Contempt filed by Wife prior to the Final Hearing pertaining to personal property, the trial court ordered Husband to return the personal property referred to in the Motion for Contempt to the marital home. The trial court denied the Motion for Contempt related to Husband’s mandatory financial disclosure, determining that Wife had not met her burden of showing that Husband had willfully failed to comply with the Court’s order.

It is very common for the court to make slight hand-written modifications to one party’s proposed orders and issue those documents with the hand-written modifications as the orders, and that is what happened in this case. However, the court unfortunately did not make hand-written modifications in Wife’s proposed decree in every place that it intended to before the decree was signed and issued as an order. Wife’s proposed Final Decree noted that Husband did not comply with Rule 1.25-A mandatory financial disclosure and that Wife was to be awarded treble damages for Husband’s noncompliance. Wife’s proposed Final Decree also included a provision requiring Husband to obtain a life insurance policy in the amount of $1,000,000 designating Wife as the beneficiary. These provisions were not modified before the court issued the decree. However, the Court’s narrative order issued with the Final Decree makes clear that Wife’s Motion for Contempt regarding Husband’s financial disclosure was denied, making the form decree and the narrative order inconsistent.

Husband filed a Motion to Reconsider to correct the discrepancies between the narrative order and the form decree, which was granted by the trial court. The trial court explained that it had intended to modify Wife’s proposed Final Decree consistent with the terms of the narrative order and that it had inadvertently missed the portions of the decree regarding the noncompliance with financial disclosure and the amount of the life insurance policy. The court issued a corrected Final Decree which reflected the terms of the narrative order, which was that husband had complied with the mandatory financial disclosure requirement and would be required to obtain a life insurance policy in the amount of $500,000.

Wife appealed, arguing that the trial court committed an error by making a substantial modification to the original divorce decree that the trial court characterized as scrivener’s errors and in declining to hold Husband in contempt for noncompliance with financial disclosure. On appeal, the N.H. Supreme Court found that the language the trial court used in the narrative order issued with the original Final Decree reflects that the trial court found that Wife was not entitled to additional relief from the court on the issue of Husband’s financial disclosure. The Court determined that, based upon the record, the trial court was effectuating its original intentions by making the revisions to the Final Decree to reflect the compliance with financial disclosure and the value of Husband’s life insurance policy. The Court also found that the trial court’s finding that Wife had not met her burden on the Motion for Contempt relative to Husband’s financial disclosure was supported by the record and a proper use of the discretion granted to the trial court.

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