Court Opinion

ID: 9462788
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:50:27.247985+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:47.406504
License: Public Domain

*950LEVIN H. CAMPBELL, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
In holding Elizabeth’s estate liable for federal estate taxes, the court decides on the authority of Slocum v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 245 Mass. 565, 139 N.E. 816 (1923), that Massachusetts law would not tolerate a denial of liability by the insurer. It seems to me that the present facts are quite different from Slocum, and while the Supreme Judicial Court might extend Slocum as the court suggests, it might equally adopt the view of the commentators cited by the court that an insurer is in no event liable to one who is neither an owner nor a beneficiary of a life insurance policy. I prefer to leave the development of the law in this area to the state courts.
I accept the court’s result here, however, because in the state proceedings the insurer, the representatives of both estates, and the Probate Court evidently took for granted that the insurer was liable. In the absence of any case law to the contrary, it seems fair to adopt this assumption of liability. And once we assume the insurer was liable, I agree that it must be liable to the estate of the insured (viewed as if the murderer had died first) and that the estate is therefore taxable. The only alternative would be to turn the Probate Court into a kind of charitable foundation, with discretion vested in the judge to determine the most deserving beneficiaries, an approach that Massachusetts would be most unlikely to approve.
A point that may have been overlooked is the likelihood that the policy’s paid-up value when Elizabeth died would not be held upon a constructive trust but would continue to belong to Harry despite his crime, falling into his estate at his death a month later. As policy owner, Harry presumably could have converted the policy into a certain sum at any time without killing the beneficiary. I do not read Slocum to deprive him of that much of the value of the policy because of his wife’s murder, since that much of the value was not generated by the crime. It should follow that the cash value of the policy is taxable to the husband’s estate and only the remainder to the wife’s. Apparently, however, the Government never pursued this theory — perhaps for some good reason — and at this stage, given the posture of all parties, I concur in the court’s disposition.