Riggs v. Palmer

According to law, a will is guarded by sets of statutes. These statutes dictate the reasons a will is allowed to be altered or voided, as well as the methods of altering or voiding them. None of these reasons apply to this specific case. A will cannot be voided simply by a feeling, or a thought. It must be done by the testator, as he is the only one who can clearly interpret and express the intent of his will. There is no way to tell if a testator "would have" changed or voided his will, simply on a certain feeling he may be conveying at the time. Unless he actively changes it, there can be no presumption unto his will. Your argument is that the defendant prevented his grandfather from potentially changing his will. While that may be true, it can also be false. Like you said earlier, there is no way to tell if the testator thought of that specific situation when the will was written. Had he perished under another circumstance, deemed shocking, or surprising, for example a car accident, that event would also have prevented him from changing his will. There would be no question then. The fact that his grandson murdered him for the inheritance, while I admit is morally reprehensible, does not change the fact that the will must be looked at under an intense eye of the law, and cannot be interpreted differently than what is written in itself or the statutes. While murder is indeed immoral, illegal, and unjustifiable, it simply cannot dictate the outcome of this case. You say that Francis Palmer would not have given his grandson the inheritance had he known he would die by his hand. That and other statements about what he could have been thinking are pure conjecture. We have absolutely no way of knowing. You cannot say that he would have revoked the will if he had known, just like you can't say he wouldn't have. There could have been yet another unforeseen circumstance in which Francis Palmer, upon knowing his grandson would kill him, would still grant him an inheritance. Because of the sheer possibility of strange situations involving personal feelings, the will cannot be interpreted by such notions. However unreasonable it may seem, Francis Palmer wrote his will and to the extent of his life, died not wish to change it, or else he would have done so. Because of this, the will is bound by law. There have been multiple cases in which a testator had sought to revoke a will, only to be denied by a beneficiary in a place of power over the will. In Gains v. Gains, the testator expressed an intention to void his will. The person who devised his will did not allow him to do so. The matter was resolved by the court finding out that the statutes did not cover the reasons why the testator wanted to void the will. Mere intention to void was not enough, and thus the will was taken from the testator with the full intent to be enforced. In this specific case, there is no law explicitly stating that should a potential beneficiary, murder the testator of the will he was hoping to inherit from, the contents of the inheritance would be revoked. If you refer to the public opinion of civil laws dating back to Roman times, you will see that those laws were created as punitive measures. I am once again stating that the defendant had already been suitably punished, in the eyes of the law, for the murder of his grandfather. The intent to punish him again would be unlawful. He is not being rewarded for murder. He is receiving what the will states he should receive, regardless of the way his grandfather died. If we begin to try to interpret what the testator's hidden intentions were regarding the stipulations of their wills, the entire institution of a last will and testament would be flawed. The entire point behind creating one, is to put everything into writing, as when a person is gone, their word will be the only thing protecting their property and legacy. We cannot assume we know what a person was thinking when they died, or what a person would have thought about something, it is too vague. It would damage the only security a person can have after they die.