16 Md. 213 | Md. | 1860
delivered the opinion of this court:
There is no inore painful and delicate duty devolved on a court of justice, than that of pronouncing upon the causes which justify a severance of the marriage relation. Public policy and public morals, alike, require that a relation so intimate and tender should nor be broken for slight or trivial causes, and impose on us the duty of carefully weighing and considering the grounds upon which we are called on to affirm a decree dissolving the bonds of matrimony, between parties who respectively claim and resist the exercise of the power conferred on us by law.
We cannot agree with the late learned Judge of the Superior court, who passed this decree, that under these Acts of Assembly, the complainant was entitled to ask, or the court authorized to grant, the decree from which this appeal was taken. Here the complainant was not abandoned by the defendant; she left, his home and society and returned to her father’s house, and had been living separated from him for a period of three years. The argument of the appellee is, that the appellant’s failure to support her, his intemperate habits and violence committed upon her person, justified her in leaving him, and was, in law, an abandonment of her by him.
By the Act of 1841, tiie court, is authorized to decree a divorce a mensa et thoro for cruelty of treatment. We have said that in this case there is evidence of such cruelty as justified the complainant in leaving the society of her husband. Such evidence, under the law, authorizes us to sanction that separation by pronouncing a decree of divorce a mensa et thoro, and this relief we are warranted in granting by the evidence in this cause, under the 3rd section of the Act of 1841. The same section authorizes the court “to order and direct who shall have the guardianship and custody of the children.” In this case, there is one child, a daughter of
A decree will be signed, reversing the decree below, and divorcing the complainant and defendant a me?isa et thoro.
Decree reversed and decree for a divorce a mensa.