Title: Reed v. Shipp

State: alabama

Issuer: Alabama Supreme Court

Document:

308 So. 2d 705 (1975)
Lula Nannie Ella REED and Fannie Reed Simmons
v.
Mary SHIPP et al.
SC 790.

Supreme Court of Alabama.
February 20, 1975.
*706 Brooks, Garrett & Thompson and Everette A. Price, Jr., Brewton, for appellants.
Otts & Moore, Brewton, Joseph B. Nix, Jr., David T. Hyde, Jr., guardian ad litem, Evergreen, for appellees.
JONES, Justice.
This is an appeal by contestants (Lula Reed and Fannie Reed Simmons) from a judgment for proponents (Mary Shipp, Elsie Shipp Pate, Edna Shipp, and Elvis Shipp) in a will contest case. The trial Court directed the jury to render a verdict for the proponents.
We set out the trial Court's entire oral instruction to the jury, including the colloquy between the Court and counsel for contestants:
What "this Judge" did there is now here "subject to review in another Court on another occasion." Failing to find that "the Judge is wrong," and there being no necessity to "straighten him out about this," we affirm.
Mack L. Reed lived his entire life as a bachelor in the Castleberry community of Conecuh County, Alabama, where he died testate on February 16, 1973, at the age of 74. He executed a Last Will and Testament on June 30, 1964, leaving his real property to Mary Shipp, as trustee, in trust for, and proportioned by description among, her three minor children; his household furnishings to his unmarried sisters, Lula and Bertha Reed, with whom he lived; and the residue equally and directly to Edna, Elsie, and Elvis Shipp.
Bertha died in 1968, and Mack sold a 150-acre tract of his original 520 acres to his nephew, Arvis Simmons, on August 8, 1970. On August 19, 1970, he executed a codicil to his 1964 will which reapportioned his remaining real property (still to be held in trust) among the three Shipp children; *708 left his household furnishings to his surviving unmarried sister, Lula; and gave the residue directly and solely to Elvis.
In support of this contention, appellants advance the proposition, with which we agree, that all that is needed to submit the case to a jury is a mere scintilla from which the jury can infer some undue activity in the procurement or execution of the will, and this can be proved by circumstantial evidence. Smith v. Moore, 278 Ala. 173, 176 So. 2d 868 (1965).
The threshold legal question presented is aptly posed and its answer correctly stated by appellants' counsel:
The single dispositive issue, then, is whether an inference is raised by the evidence that Mary Shipp was "active" in and about the execution and preparation of the will, as undue activity is legally defined. Appellants urge:
The "other evidence" may be summarized: Mary Shipp and her husband, as neighbors of Mack Reed, worked for him almost continuously during the last 25 years of his life. Another neighbor "caught" Mack and Mary in 1950 "having a sexual relation in the barn." They were seen together on a day to day basis in the fields, in the truck going and coming from town, and at the livestock sales barns in Brewton and Evergreen. Although Mary's husband, Cary, worked for Mack, he was seldom seen with Mack during these years. Mack also spent considerable time with the children, carrying them in his arms when they were small, playing with them, buying for them, and referring to them as his children.
Lula, the unmarried sister with whom he lived, testified that her brother Mack was "foolish" about Mary; and a neighbor stated that from the conduct of these parties "anybody that didn't know them would have thought it was a man and wife and children."
Appellants contend:
We have no quarrel with the "authorities cited ... that indicate no direct evidence is necessary."
The general rule is set out in 94 C.J.S. Wills § 253, p. 1130:
We observe with interest that one of the cases footnoted under the above quoted proposition is the case of Locke v. Sparks, 263 Ala. 137, 81 So. 2d 670 (1955), the same case cited by the trial Judge in support of his directed verdict. Further, the Locke case clearly holds that, given an illicit relationship, some additional evidence direct or circumstantialof undue influence is necessary to meet the burden of proof.
Appellants do not contend that there was any evidence, direct or circumstantial, that the testator made any disposition of his property "as the result of restraint, or any other agency which poisoned his mind," in *710 connection with the drafting or execution of his original will in 1964. Nor are we satisfied that the disposition of his property to the Shipp children was "highly unnatural" under the circumstances.
Chief Justice Chilton, speaking for the Court in 1856, in a strikingly similar case, stated:
Almost a half century later, the New Jersey Supreme Court in In re: Willford's Will, N.J., 51 A. 501 (1902), reached the same conclusion in a similar factual context, and observed:
See also Dees v. Metts, 245 Ala. 370, 17 So. 2d 137 (1944).
At any rate, it is settled law in Alabama that no presumption of undue activity in the procurement of a will amounting to fraud or undue influence arises from the mere disposition by the testator of his property to these children whom he loved *711 and treated as his own. If they were indeed his children, or if he thought they were, influenced to provide for them he may have been; but unduly influenced, as that term is legally understood, is entirely another matter.
Alternatively, appellants seek to have us view this evidence as constituting some inference of undue activity in the procurement of the codicil to the will. The challenge is intriguing, but judicial restraint requires that we not decide some issue wholly unnecessary to our opinion.
While it is established law in our state that a codicil republishes a will as of the date of the codicil, and that the two instruments are construed as one instrument as of the date of republication (Kelley v. Sutliff, 257 Ala. 371, 59 So. 2d 65 (1952)), this is a rule of construction which is inapplicable to the principle of undue influence.
Central to "undue influence" is the second element set out in the trial Court's charge, i. e., "a person must have been favored under the will or must have done something which caused people close to her to be favored...". The trial Court's finding that "... of course there were favored beneficiaries under the will" necessarily referred to the original will, because, as we have seen, the codicil merely conformed the testator's prior wishes at the time of the original willto the current status of his property holdings at the time of the codicil. It is apparent that the testator's execution of the codicil was a mere updating of his personal affairs. Indeed, under the codicil the children received an aggregate of 150 acres less by virtue of a prior conveyance, while Lula (the testator's sister and one of the contestants) received all rather than ½ of the household furnishings by virtue of Bertha's prior death.
Assuming, without deciding, that Mary "unduly influenced" the testator to execute his 1970 codicil to his 1964 will, we must yet ask: What did her children, as "favored beneficiaries" under the original will, gain by way of the codicil? Clearly, since the only result thereby affected was a reapportionment of the testator's remaining real property (150 acres less than originally devised), the question is self-answeringabsolutely nothing.
There was no error in the action of the trial Court in directing a verdict for the proponents of the will.
Affirmed.
HEFLIN, C. J., and MERRILL, MADDOX and SHORES, JJ., concur.
[1]  By stipulation of the parties, incorporated in the pretrial order, "undue influence" was the only issue in the case.
[2]  See APJICivil, Will Contest, 38.09.