Court Opinion

ID: 9754046
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 19:40:50.21446+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:47.584055
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Justice Pomeroy:
I concur in the result reached by the majority, and with much of the reasoning of the majority opinion. I add this brief additional opinion because the majority seems to consider the question as one of first impression, when in fact there is what I consider to be controlling precedent.
Section 832 of the Inheritance and Estate Tax Act of 1961 was suggested by the Act of 1939, P. L. 721, §1, 72 P.S. §2302, and, as the Joint State Government Commission observes in its 1963 report, is in conformity with existing law. 72 P.S. §2485-632. This Court construed the same statutory language which is involved in this case in Hitchcock Estate, 385 Pa. 569, 124 A. 2d 360 (1956). The facts there were very much the same as those here, except that the promise of the surviving spouse to provide for the heirs of the deceased husband was contained in a “joint will and contract” instead of in a separate agreement. The widow, by a codicil after her husband died, limited the bequests to her husband’s side of the family to one-half of the joint estate as it existed at the date of his death. The value was greater at the time of her death, and the husband’s heirs asserted a claim against the estate for one-half of the higher value. The claim was compromised at 43%. The widow’s executor contended that the amount paid in the settlement of the testamentary claims was a proper deduction in calculating the clear value of the estate subject to inheritance tax. The Court, in an opinion by Mr. Justice Charles Alvin Jones, held that the payments were not supported by adequate and full consideration in money or money’s worth; that they were in effect “testamentary, bene*179factions and not debts.” The reciprocal promises between husband and wife were sufficient to support the agreement and to constitute it an enforceable contract, but not adequate under the Act to qualify as a deduction. The fact that a “genuine dispute” existed as to the amount payable to the claimants did not convert the amount paid to damages for breach of contract, and so a deductible item; “whatever the husband’s relatives were entitled to receive of the estate remaining after Mrs. Hitchcock’s death they took under and by virtue of the joint will and not otherwise.”
I think the rationale of the Hitchcock decision is equally applicable to the case at bar.
Mr. Justice Jones joins in this opinion.