Hayes v. Moulton

• Decision Date: 26 February 1907
• Citation: 194 Mass. 157,80 N.E. 215
• Parties: HAYES v. MOULTON et al.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

194 Mass. 157

80 N.E. 215

HAYES v. MOULTON et al.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Worcester.

February 26, 1907

COUNSEL

Alfd. S. Hayes, for appellants.

Colby & Bayley and John M. Cochran, for appellee.

OPINION

SHELDON J.

The questions argued in this case arise upon the refusal of the judge to give certain instructions that were specifically asked for by the respondents. There was doubtless a great body of evidence which called for serious consideration by the jury upon the question whether Mrs. West's will was procured through the fraud or undue influence of Mrs. Hayes the only beneficiary thereof; but if this question was answered wrongly by the verdict, the respondents' only redress is by application to the judge for a new trial for that reason. Aiken v. Holyoke St. Ry., 180 Mass. 8, 61 N.E. 557. As was said by Montgomery, J., in Asbury v. Charlotte Electric Ry. & Power Co., 125 N.C. 568, 573, 34 S.E. 654, we cannot criticise the verdict of the jury.

The eleventh request could not have been given in the form asked for. The fact that a will differs from the previously expressed purpose of the testatrix, or from what it would have been if, besides being in full possession of her faculties, she had acted under independent advice, does not require it to be set aside. She had the right to change her mind and to select her own advisers. And the jury were sufficiently told that the will could not be sustained unless the petitioner proved that the testatrix was of sound and disposing mind and memory.

The fourteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth, twentieth twenty-second, twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-seventh requests are all objectionable, and the judge was not required to give them. Some of them assumed the truth of facts which were in dispute; most of them were attempts to put arguments for the respondents' contentions into the mouth of the judge, by calling upon him to charge so as to emphasize certain portions of the evidence; all of them were obnoxious to one or both of these objections. Both fraud and undue influence were sufficiently defined and explained in what was said to the jury.

All the claims of the respondents mentioned in the eighteenth request were sufficiently explained to the jury; and it was made plain to them that they might infer the existence of undue influence from the facts mentioned in this request, if they found these facts to be proved and chose to draw such an inference. This was as far as it was the duty of the judge to go. Woodbury v. Woodbury, 141 Mass. 329, 5 N.E. 275, 55 Am. Rep. 479; Banfield v. Whipple, 14 Allen, 13, 14.

It would not have helped the jury to state to them the abstract proposition of law contained in the twelfth request. It is true of course, as argued by the respondents, that a person may have sufficient capacity to make a will if let alone and yet not be of sufficient capacity to resist the pressure upon him of strong influence; and the question whether the use of such influence is lawful or not often may depend, and perhaps in ...