The Case Of Edith Windsor

In 2009, after the death of her wife Thea Spyer, Edith Windsor, a white female residing in New York, submitted a petition to claim the federal estate tax exemption for surviving spouses. She was denied from doing so by the section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which only recognized the term “spouse” in marriages between man and woman. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) denied Windsor’s petition to claim the federal estate tax for surviving spouses due to the exemption not being applicable to same-sex marriages. In 2010, Windsor sued the federal government in the District Court for the Southern District of New York, pursuing a refund because DOMA singled out legally married same-sex couples. The third section of DOMA is unconstitutional
After graduating from Temple university, she married Saul Windsor. This marriage lasted less than a year because she wanted to be with women. Afterwards she moved to New York City to pursue her master’s degree in mathematics. She later became one of the first female system programmers at International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). In 1963 Windsor met Spyer in a restaurant in New York City and they began dating in 1965. In 1967 Spyer proposed to Windsor and remained engaged until they were legally married on May 22, 2007. After forty-one years of romantic partnership, they decided to get married in Toronto, Ontario under the Canadian civil marriage act. Spyer died on February 5, 2009 at the age of seventy-seven from an aortic stenosis, her second serious medical condition after being diagnosed with Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Spyer left her entire estate to Windsor, Windsor claimed her federal estate tax exemption after Spyer’s death but, Windsor was required to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes on her inheritance of her wife’s estate due to the federal law not recognizing the validity of their marriage in the state of New York. If the federal law had recognized the validity of her marriage to Spyer, Windsor would have qualified for an unlimited spousal deduction and paid no federal estate taxes. Windsor then claimed for a refund of the federal estate taxes she had to pay on her
District Court for the Southern District of New York, to request a refund challenging DOMA section three, due to same-sex couples being denied the estate tax marital deduction, though the estate tax marital deduction applies to all lawfully married couples. The third section of DOMA states, “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” Since this statement is written under the third section of DOMA, the IRS notified Windsor on May 26, 2010, their decision that the estate of a deceased person who was married to another person of the same sex, could not hold the right to the marital deduction. Section three of DOMA is unconstitutional because it excludes same-sex spouses from the benefits that heterosexual spouses have, including the estate of tax marital deduction. On June 6, 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York accepted the summary judgement motion that Windsor had filed for. The court stated, “Section 3 of DOMA violated the equal protection clause because there was no rational basis to support it.” The second circuit became the first court of