Ex-playmate fights for millions in US Supreme Court (Roundup)

Mar 1, 2006, 3:41 GMT

Washington - Former Playmate Anna Nicole Smith went to the US Supreme Court Tuesday in a fight over the inheritance of her late billionaire husband.

Dressed in black, Smith ignored reporters questions outside the court. At issue is whether state or federal courts have jurisdiction over the inheritance conflict, which pits Smith against the son of her husband.

Legal analysts said that the nation's top judges appeared to favour the arguments proposed by Smith's lawyers, who claimed that federal courts had a right to intervene in the case because it involved allegations of fraud rather than being a simple matter of probate.

Smith married billionaire oil tycoon Howard Marshall in 1994, when he was 89 and she was 26. He died 14 months later, and Smith claimed a part of his inheritance, arguing that Marshall's son E. Pierce Marshall altered the will after the tycoon's death to exclude her from her rightful due.

A federal court awarded her 474 million dollars, but an appellate court later threw out the decision, saying the judge did not have authority to rule on the issue.

During oral arguments in which the court's members grill the lawyers for both sides, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it an 'extraordinary thing' for lawyers for E. Pierce Marshall to claim that Smith could not bring a related claim in federal court. 'That's just not the way our system works,' she said.

Justice David Souter summarized Smith's claim as, 'Just give me the money I would have had,' while Justice Stephen Breyer said Smith's claim was that her husband intended to give her this gift and that three pages of his living trust document had been altered after his death.

'It's quite a story,' he said.