Insane delusion

Last updated April 09, 2019

Insane delusion is the legal term of art in the common law tradition used to describe a false conception of reality that a testator of a will adheres to against all reason and evidence to the contrary. A will made by a testator suffering from an insane delusion that affects the provisions made in the will may fail in whole or in part. Only the portion of the will caused by the insane delusion fails, including potentially the entire will. Will contests often involve claims that the testator was suffering from an insane delusion.

Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior. It has been defined both as "the Science of Justice" and "the Art of Justice". Law is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state. State-enforced laws can be made by a collective legislature or by a single legislator, resulting in statutes, by the executive through decrees and regulations, or established by judges through precedent, normally in common law jurisdictions. Private individuals can create legally binding contracts, including arbitration agreements that may elect to accept alternative arbitration to the normal court process. The formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution, written or tacit, and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people.

In law, common law is that body of law derived from judicial decisions of courts and similar tribunals. The defining characteristic of “common law” is that it arises as precedent. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, a common law court looks to past precedential decisions of relevant courts, and synthesizes the principles of those past cases as applicable to the current facts. If a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the court is usually bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision. If, however, the court finds that the current dispute is fundamentally distinct from all previous cases, and legislative statutes are either silent or ambiguous on the question, judges have the authority and duty to resolve the issue. The court states an opinion that gives reasons for the decision, and those reasons agglomerate with past decisions as precedent to bind future judges and litigants. Common law, as the body of law made by judges, stands in contrast to and on equal footing with statutes which are adopted through the legislative process, and regulations which are promulgated by the executive branch. Stare decisis, the principle that cases should be decided according to consistent principled rules so that similar facts will yield similar results, lies at the heart of all common law systems.

A testator is a person who has written and executed a last will and testament that is in effect at the time of his/her death. It is any "person who makes a will."

An insane delusion is distinct from testamentary capacity. A testator might be suffering from an insane delusion but otherwise possess the requisite capacity to make a will. Similarly, an insane delusion is distinct from a mere mistake. If suffering from an insane delusion, a testator is not subject to change his or her mind regarding the delusion if presented with contrary evidence, whereas a mistake is capable of being corrected if the testator is told the truth. Additionally, while an insane delusion may cause portions of a will to fail, most courts will not reform or invalidate a will because of a mistake unless it was the result of fraud.^[1]

In the common law tradition, testamentary capacity is the legal term of art used to describe a person's legal and mental ability to make or alter a valid will. This concept has also been called sound mind and memory or disposing mind and memory.

In law, fraud is deliberate deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud itself can be a civil wrong, a criminal wrong, or it may cause no loss of money, property or legal right but still be an element of another civil or criminal wrong. The purpose of fraud may be monetary gain or other benefits, such as obtaining a passport or travel document, driver's license or qualifying for a mortgage by way of false statements.

Origin

The insane delusion concept was created in the 1826 British case Dew v. Clark. In that case, a father believed that his daughter was "the devil incarnate" and disinherited her in his will of 1818. After her father's death, evidence presented by the daughter showed that she was well known for her good disposition and that her father had falsely told others that he lavished his daughter with praise and wealth. The probate court found that the father's mindset when he made the 1818 will was normal in all respects except toward his daughter. The court found that his thoughts about her, "did and could only proceed from, and be founded in, insanity," a "partial insanity" that only extended to his thoughts about his daughter and caused him to disinherit her. The court said that this delusion caused the will to fail.^[2]

Probate is the judicial process whereby a will is "proved" in a court of law and accepted as a valid public document that is the true last testament of the deceased, or whereby the estate is settled according to the laws of intestacy in the state of residence [or real property] of the deceased at time of death in the absence of a legal will.

Examples

In the 1854 case Addington v. Wilson, the Supreme Court of Indiana held that a testator who disinherited his daughters because he believed them to be witches was not for that reason alone so insane as to deem him incapable of making a valid will. The court justified its decision by pointing to distinguished jurists and religious figures who affirmed the possibility of witchcraft; if these people's beliefs did not render them insane, neither did the testator's.^[3]

Supreme Court of Indiana the highest court in the U.S. state of Indiana

The Supreme Court of Indiana, established by Article 7 of the Indiana Constitution, is the highest judicial authority in the state of Indiana. Located in Indianapolis, the Court's chambers are in the north wing of the Indiana Statehouse.

Witchcraft or witchery broadly means the practice of and belief in magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups. Witchcraft is a broad term that varies culturally and societally, and thus can be difficult to define with precision, and cross-cultural assumptions about the meaning or significance of the term should be applied with caution. Witchcraft often occupies a religious divinatory or medicinal role, and is often present within societies and groups whose cultural framework includes a magical world view.

In In re Robertson's Estate (1948), the Supreme Court of Oklahoma held that a testator who declared that he had "no children" and "no deceased children" in his will, when he actually had two living children, was suffering from an insane delusion, as the testator had "no rational basis whatsoever" to declare that he had no children.^[4]

Related Research Articles

The insanity defense, also known as the mental disorder defense, is an affirmative defense by excuse in a criminal case, arguing that the defendant is not responsible for his or her actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act. This is contrasted with an excuse of provocation, in which defendant is responsible, but the responsibility is lessened due to a temporary mental state. It is also contrasted with a finding that a defendant cannot stand trial in a criminal case because a mental disease prevents them from effectively assisting counsel, from a civil finding in trusts and estates where a will is nullified because it was made when a mental disorder prevented a testator from recognizing the natural objects of their bounty, and from involuntary civil commitment to a mental institution, when anyone is found to be gravely disabled or to be a danger to themselves or to others.

The M'Naghten rule is any variant of the 1840s jury instruction in a criminal case when there is a defense of insanity:

that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

Will and testament legal declaration by which a person names one or more persons to manage his or her estate and provides for the distribution of his property at death

A will or testament is a legal document by which a person, the testator, expresses their wishes as to how their property is to be distributed at death, and names one or more persons, the executor, to manage the estate until its final distribution. For the devolution of property not disposed of by will, see inheritance and intestacy.

In Civil law and Roman law, the legitime, also known as a forced share or legal right share, of a decedent's estate is that portion of the estate from which he cannot disinherit his children, or his parents, without sufficient legal cause. The word comes from French héritier légitime, meaning "rightful heir."

Wills have a lengthy history.

Daniel M'Naghten was a Scottish woodturner who assassinated English civil servant Edward Drummond while suffering from paranoid delusions. Through his trial and its aftermath, he has given his name to the legal test of criminal insanity in England and other common law jurisdictions known as the M'Naghten rules.

A will contest, in the law of property, is a formal objection raised against the validity of a will, based on the contention that the will does not reflect the actual intent of the testator or that the will is otherwise invalid. Will contests generally focus on the assertion that the testator lacked testamentary capacity, was operating under an insane delusion, or was subject to undue influence or fraud. A will may be challenged in its entirety or in part.

A pretermitted heir is a term used in the law of property to describe a person who would likely stand to inherit under a will, except that the testator did not include the person in the testator's will. Omission may occur because the testator did not know of the omitted person at the time the will was written.

In the common law of England, the doctrine of worthier title was a legal doctrine that preferred taking title to real estate by descent over taking title by devise or by purchase. It essentially provides that a remainder cannot be created in the grantor's heirs, at least not by those words.

The slayer rule, in the common law of inheritance, is a doctrine that prohibits inheritance by a person who murders someone from whom he or she stands to inherit. In calculating inheritance of the decedent's estate, the effect of the slayer rule was that the slayer would be treated as though he or she had predeceased the person who had been murdered, therefore his or her share of the estate would pass to his or her issue.

Automatism is a rarely used criminal defence. It is one of the mental condition defences that relate to the mental state of the defendant. Automatism can be seen variously as lack of voluntariness, lack of culpability (unconsciousness) or excuse (Schopp). Automatism means that the defendant was not aware of his or her actions when making the particular movements that constituted the illegal act. For example, Esther Griggs in 1858 threw her child out of a first floor window believing that the house was on fire, while having a sleep terror. In 2002, Peter Buck, lead guitarist of the band R.E.M., was cleared of several charges, including assault, which resulted from automatism brought on by a bad interaction between alcohol and sleeping pills. In a 2009 case in Aberporth in west Wales, Brian Thomas strangled his wife in their camper van, also during a sleep terror, when he mistook his wife for an intruder. The defence of automatism is denying that the person was acting in the sense that the criminal law demands. As such it is really a denial-of-proof – the defendant is asserting that the offence is not made out. The prosecution does not have to disprove the defence as is sometimes erroneously reported; the prosecution has to prove all the elements of the offence including the voluntary act requirement. Automatism is a defence even against strict liability crimes like dangerous driving, where no intent is necessary.

Joint wills and mutual wills are closely related terms used in the law of wills to describe two types of testamentary writing that may be executed by a married couple to ensure that their property is disposed of identically. Neither should be confused with mirror wills which means two separate, identical wills, which may or may not also be mutual wills.

Clark v. Arizona, 548 U.S. 735 (2006), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of the insanity defense used by Arizona.

The Dorothy Talbye Trial (1638) is an early American example of a trial of an insane woman at a time when the insane were treated no differently from ordinary criminals. Talbye was hanged in 1639 for killing her three-year-old daughter because, she claimed, God told her to do so. Although Puritan Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony saw Talbye as possessed by Satan, the penalty for murder was necessarily death.

Jones v. United States, 463 U.S. 354 (1983), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the court, for the first time, addressed whether the due process requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment allows defendants, who were found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) of a misdemeanor crime, to be involuntarily confined to a mental institution until such times as they are no longer a danger to themselves or others with few other criteria or procedures limiting the actions of the state.

Insanity in English law is a defence to criminal charges based on the idea that the defendant was unable to understand what he was doing, or, that he was unable to understand that what he was doing was wrong.

White v Driver was a case decided in 1809 concerning a challenge to a will on the grounds of insanity. It laid down that if there was a previous history of insanity, the burden of proof lies in proving the sanity of the testator when making the will. The case was decided at Doctor's Commons under civil law, but continues to be quoted in the UK, Australia and in the US as recently as 2010.

The South African law of succession prescribes the rules which determine the devolution of a person's estate after his death, and all matters incidental thereto. It identifies the beneficiaries who are entitled to succeed to the deceased's estate, and the extent of the benefits they are to receive, and determines the different rights and duties that persons may have in a deceased's estate. It forms part of private law.

In Estate Orpen v Estate Atkinson, an important case in the South African law of succession, the testators, the Atkinsons, massed their estates in a joint will. They had one child, a daughter. According to the stipulations of the will, the massed estate would, upon the death of Mr. Atkinson, should he die first, be handed over to the executors of the estate, who would act as trustees; a trust was thus created.

References

↑ Jesse Dukeminier & Stanley M. Johanson, Wills, Trusts & Estates, Sixth Edition, Aspen Publishers, 2000, ISBN 0-7355-0636-1
↑ Dew v. Clark, 162 Eng. Rep. 410 (Prerog. 1826)
↑ Addington v. Wilson, 5 Blackf. (Ind.) 137, 61 Am.Dec. 81 (Sup. Ct. Ind. 1854)
↑ In re Robertson's Estate, 189 P.2d 615 (Okla. 1948)

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[1] Jesse Dukeminier & Stanley M. Johanson, Wills, Trusts & Estates, Sixth Edition, Aspen Publishers, 2000, ISBN 0-7355-0636-1

[2] Dew v. Clark, 162 Eng. Rep. 410 (Prerog. 1826)

[3] Addington v. Wilson, 5 Blackf. (Ind.) 137, 61 Am.Dec. 81 (Sup. Ct. Ind. 1854)

[4] In re Robertson's Estate, 189 P.2d 615 (Okla. 1948)

Insane delusion

Contents

Origin

Examples

Related Research Articles

References