Can someone get a spouse off a deed that never lived together and was incarcerated?

Question

If someone bought a property before marriage (premarital), got married, refinanced the property while spouse was incarcerated which added spouse to quit claim deed, then got divorced months after the spouse was released, they never lived together, never consummated the marriage, and the spouse never contributed to the mortgage or repairs, can the person who refinanced the property get the divorced spouse's name off the deed?

Answer 1

Two people can have an equal interest in real property without being married, and being incarcerated doesn't affect a person's property rights. What matters is that now your ex-wife has a legal interest in the property. As a separate issue, she presumably also has a legal obligation w.r.t. the mortgage (otherwise the quitclaim deed makes no sense). The easiest solution is for the other party to voluntarily transfer their interest in the property to you via a quitclaim deed.

A difficult solution is to use the judicial process to remove a person from the title. This could be done if there was fraud involved in the property transfer process, for example if the quitclaim deed was forged (presumably not the case here). You might sue to correct an error which doesn't reflect the terms of the transaction, via a reformation action, but that doesn't seem to be the case (a party not understanding the consequences of transferring an interest isn't an error in the relevant sense). You need to hire an attorney to solve the problem (he will look at all of the documentation relevant for your case for a possible solution).