Addington v. Wilson
| Decision Date | 27 May 1854 |
| Citation | 5 Ind. 153 |
| Parties | Addington and Others v. Wilson and Another |
| Court | Indiana Supreme Court |
APPEAL from the Randolph Probate Court.
The judgment is affirmed with costs.
James Morrison, Beattie McClelland, and N. B. Hawkins for the appellants.
David Kilgore, for the appellees.
John Wilson, the executor therein named, presented to the Randolph Probate Court, in 1849, for probate, the alleged last will and testament of Francis Stephen, deceased. Addington, and others interested, filed objections. Issues were made, and tried by a jury, and the will decided to be valid. A new trial was denied.
The trial was in progress at the expiration of the regular term of the Court, and the Court held over to complete the trial. There was no error in so doing. R. S. 1843, p. 733, § 325. [R. S. 1881, § 1379.]
The second objection is, that the evidence does not support the verdict. It is claimed that the testator was insane when he executed the will. It appears that he was an ordinarily prudent, judicious business man, an average farmer, and that he had acquired property; that he had five children by a wife who was deceased, and with whom he had, for sometime before her death, lived unhappily, and at whose death he expressed joy; that a portion of his children left him awhile before his decease, and before the making of his will, owing, as they asserted, to domestic difficulties, and refused to return. To those children he left nothing by his will. It further appears that the testator believed in witchcraft that his wife had been a witch, and that "at her death she had left her witch-sticks to her children, or some of them." He complained of having been very badly treated by some of his daughters, as he said he had been by his wife, and he expressed the belief that this bad treatment originated in the fact of their being witches. In short, the testator seems to have differed from men in general in these particulars alone, that he believed in witchcraft, believed that his wife and daughters were witches, and that they practised their infernal arts upon him.
By our law, a person competent to make a will, may entirely disinherit his children if he pleases to do so; nor can his motives for such an act, where it is done, be called in question. The right is absolute to dispose of all of one's property, over and above the portion required to pay debts and expenses. The hardship of the case, therefore, where children are disinherited, is of no weight further than as a circumstance for the consideration of the jury, in connection with the other evidence submitted, tending to show insanity, or other mental defect.
As to the line of conduct pursued by the wife and daughters towards the testator, and that of the testator towards them, the record discloses nothing; and we can not, therefore, judge whether that of the former was such as to justify the latter in believing that they were possessed by evil spirits or not; nor whether that of the latter towards his wife and daughters was such as tended to indicate insanity or not.
The fact, therefore, that the testator believed those members of his family witches, unaccompanied with the grounds for his belief, would furnish an unsatisfactory basis on which to rest a conclusion, for the tenor of the evidence makes the impression that it was a course of harsh, undutiful treatment of the testator on the part of the disinherited daughters that occasioned the disherison; and that he attributed that conduct to the fact of their being bewitched. In other words, that the testator disinherited his...
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