Court Opinion

ID: 9620515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 05:43:19.871802+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:04:51.107692
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
I believe the main opinion has missed the point. It seems to say that the appointment of a guardian for one having mental problems does not include an authority to protect the ward against his infirmities. It says an incompetent is only an incompetent during the pendency of his incompetence, unless another court, in a strictly civil action determines he is competent. Another court in another county might decide otherwise in an identical case. This inconsistency seems to give the lie to a sort of impotence of any legislation designed to notify the world of a ward’s incapacity, warning against any contractual relationship with him. It is like saying that legislation designed to protect infants against their contracts and immaturity extends but to a factual determination, during such infancy, that a particular infant is a sort of Quiz Kid, and really not an infant if he displays the highly questionable genius of some adults.
*32Defendant was declared incompetent by the probate court. There has been no termination of that adjudication. He enjoyed or disenjoyed that coveted status at the time of this lawsuit. To say that being a veteran, there is a sort of limited guardianship, flies in the teeth of the adjudication and the facts. The probate court imposed no such limitation in its decree. This veteran is just as much an incompetent under the guardianship legislation and the decree of the court as any other adjudicated incompetent. We may as well say that an adjudged insane is not insane, if, in a civil suit, a court opines that he has done something that seems to reflect the action of a normal person.
Appellant concedes that the amounts put in trust for him are subject to plenary control by a duly appointed guardian, and are inviolate. But, he says, if the money draws interest or is converted into confederate currency, those questionable assets are exe-cutionable. This reasoning seems to do violence to the Veterans Administration’s established policy of protecting the corpus of such a fund, places a rather ridiculous emphasis on the concept of transmutation, and quite clearly emasculates the spirit and letter of legislation designed to protect funds charged with a personal trust. The decision here could lead to fantastic abuse of the statutes and protective policies as to trust funds. The trial court should be affirmed, with costs to defendants.