A question of ethics

Question

Heber Burke and his wife Evelyn spent most of their lives in Ohio and jointly accumulated a substantial amount of property there. When Evelyn died in February 1985, the Burkes had been married for fifty-three years and had two children, four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Heber had originally hailed from Pike County, Kentucky, and in June 1985, he returned to Pike County and bought a house there. In the same month, he told his children that he was going to marry Lexie Damron, a widow who attended his church. Lexie and Heber were married on July 20. On July 27, Heber executed a will, which was drawn up by Lexie's attorney, in which he left all of his property to Lexie. Heber died three weeks later. Heber's children, Don-ald Burke and Beatrice Bates, contested the will, alleging that Heber had lacked testamentary capacity and that Heber's will had resulted from Lexie's undue influence over him. Friends and relatives of Heber in Pike County testified that they had never known Heber to drink and that, although he seemed saddened by his first wife's death, he was not incapacitated by it. Accord-ing to the children's witnesses, however, after Evelyn's death, Heber allegedly drank heavily and constantly; had frequent crying spells; repeatedly visited his wife's grave; tried to dig her up so that he could talk to her; and had hallucinations, talking to people who were not present and claiming that Evelyn visited him regularly at night, which frightened him into sleeping in the attic. The jury found the will to be invalid on the grounds of undue influence, and Lexie appealed.

Answer 1

A QUESTION OF ETHICS
1. A basic policy of the courts is that the wishes of a deceased will be carried out, regard-less of whether they are arbitrary or unfair. In the words of one court, "the courts guard jealous-ly the rights of all rational people, including the aged, the infirm, the forgetful and the queer, to make wills sufficient to withstand the attacks of those left out and those dissatisfied with the expressed desires of the departed." Enforcing the expressed desires of the departed, however, at times may conflict with another policy: that of preventing the unfairness that occurs when the expressed wishes of the deceased are in fact the wishes of a person wielding undue influence over the testator. If undue influenced is alleged, a court will closely scrutinize several factors, including the mental capacity of the testator, whether the property was disposed of unnaturally or unequally under the will, the specific circumstances of the testator's life, and the conditions under which the will was executed.
2. One factor to consider here is that, while it is not normally considered "unnatural" to leave everything to one's wife to the exclusion of one's children, given the extent to which Heber's first wife, Evelyn, had contributed to the estate, it would be difficult to assume that Heber intended that Evelyn's children should be left empty-handed. Consider also that Heber had only known Lexie for only a very short time. One of the "badges" of undue influence is a relationship of brief duration at a later point in life between the testator and the beneficiary. Fi-nally, Heber's alcoholism and hallucinations provide at least some evidence for doubting his testamentary capacity. The appellate court in this case stated that it was "not unmindful of the possibility that the jury invalidated this will simply because it was unfair." Nonetheless, the ap-pellate court also found that there was substantial evidence to support the verdict, and it was thus compelled to uphold it.
3. As discussed above, it has never been required that a testator dispose of his or her property fairly. If the law were to demand that only the natural objects of a testator's bounty (which would include Evelyn's children in this case) should inherit under a will, it would interfere dramatically with the long-standing and valued rights of property owners to dispose of their property as they please. If Heber's will had been deemed valid, his children would not inherit, and this seems contrary to any sense of fairness and justice. And yet to protect their interests, and those of others in similar circumstances, would involve a tradeoff that society has seen as unacceptable: a diminution in the rights of property owners to do as they wish with their property during their life and on their death.