Court Opinion

ID: 9524591
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:54:45.225911+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:11:07.010451
License: Public Domain

ON PETITION FOR REHEARING
Crumpacker, J.
We are urged to rehear this appeal because (1) we erred in holding that a widow is not estopped to contest the validity of her deceased husband’s will by the single fact that she did not first elect to take under the law as she was privileged to do under Burns’ 1933, §6-2332; and (2) we failed to decide the questions raised by the court’s refusal to give the appellants’ tendered instructions 7 and 21.
The appellants’ brief in support of their petition adds considerable force to the argument originally made in reference to the first proposition above stated. Nevertheless we remain firm in our belief that the election statute is not a part of, nor should *350it be construed as limiting in any manner the scope of the statutes concerning suits to contest wills. If a man dies and leaves a valid will with which his widow is dissatisfied, she must elect to take under the law within six months of its probate or she is conclusively presumed to have accepted the provisions made for her by the will. If a man dies and leaves a will which is subsequently adjudicated to be invalid, he dies intestate and his widow never had an effective choice between the law and a will. The failure to do an impotent and useless thing under the election statutes should not prejudice her rights under the statutes pertaining to the contest of wills. So it seems to us that the most that can be said of a widow’s failure to elect to take under the law rather than under the terms of a will she considers invalid is that she has lost her right of election if the will is subsequently adjudicated to be good and more than six months has elapsed since the date it was probated.
The appellants insist, however, that when a will is probated it is presumed to be valid and such presumption puts a widow to the necessity of renouncing its provisions or suffering an estoppel of her rights to contest its validity. Just what character of estoppel such a situation presents it is difficult for us to understand. The appellants suggest that it is in the nature of the common law estoppel in pais which arose “only in case of those solemn and peculiar acts to which the law gave the power of creating a right or passing estate, and to which the law attached as much efficacy and importance as to matters appearing either by deed or of record.” 19 Am. Jur., Estoppel, § 38, p. 633. In Indiana, however, the doctrine of estoppel in pais has been given a much wider scope and our courts have used the term interchangeably with “equitable estoppel.” As was said in Fletcher v. Holmes *351(1865), 25 Ind. 458, “estoppels in pais, unlike technical estoppels by deed or matter of record, never exist without reference to the moral qualities of the conduct alleged. The door is shut against asserting a right when that would result in doing an injury, by the party asserting it, to some other person, or when, ‘in good conscience and honest dealing a party ought not to be permitted to gainsay’ his previous conduct.” Estoppel in pais “is justified on the ground of prevention of fraud by the person sought to be estopped, the fraud consisting in the denial of that which the person sought to be estopped has previously asserted.” State v. Mutual Life Ins. Co. (1910), 175 Ind. 59, 93 N. E. 213. The most that can be said of the appellee’s conduct in the case at bar is that she apparently acquiesced in her husband’s pretended will before she brought suit to set it aside. At no time did she affirmatively assert its validity nor did she accept any benefits under its provisions. There was no fraud in her conduct nor was anyone misled thereby to act to his detriment. The appellants would have benefited by her failure to contest the will, of course, but even though she had elected to take under the law before instituting suit to contest the will, a procedure the appellants insist was proper and necessary, the result would have been the same and, if there was any inconsistency in her conduct, it in no way affected the appellants’ rights. We are unable to see any of the essential elements of an estoppel in pais in the situation and it seems to us that, in its final analysis, the appellants’ contention resolves itself into the assertion that when a man dies testate leaving a widow, she must renounce the provisions of the will pertaining to her, by an election to take under the law, as a condition precedent to a suit to contest the validity of the will.
*352We have been referred to no case so holding nor have we found any. The case of Herbert v. Nat. City Bank, Exr. (1929), 88 Ind. App. 626, 165 N. E. 80, which the appellants assert prescribes such a procedure, merely holds that a widow who has elected to take under the law does not thereby affirm the validity of the will involved and so estop herself from contesting it. In that connection the court said: “At most, she but recognized or acknowledged the fact that the instrument probated purported to be the will of her late husband, without in any way obligating herself as to its validity.” Logic indicates that the effect of a failure to elect should be the same. In other words the election and contest statutes pertaining to wills are separate and distinct and neither abridges or limits the rights granted under the other unless some principle of equitable estoppel intervenes.
In our initial opinion we failed to decide the questions raised by the court’s refusal to give the appellants' tendered instructions 7 and 21. We did so because cause these instructions were discussed in the appellants’ brief only collaterally in connection with the proposition that the court erred in permitting two medical experts to answer a certain hypothetical question. The burden of these instructions was in explanation of the difference in the legal and medical standards for the determination of a person’s mental soundness. As the jury was fully and accurately informed concerning the legal standard of testamentary capacity it is not to be presumed that they departed therefrom in reaching their verdict simply because it was not explained to them that a man whom doctors of medicine might regard as unsound in mind might nevertheless have sufficient mental capacity to meet the requirements the law demands of a testator in making *353a valid will. We see no error in the court’s refusal to give the instructions in question.
Petition denied.
Note. — Reported in 98 N. E. 2d 232.