In re Estate of Miller

• Decision Date: 04 December 2008
• Docket Number: Docket: Wal-07-530
• Citation: 960 A.2d 1140,2008 ME 176
• Parties: ESTATE OF Thelma M. MILLER.
• Court: Maine Supreme Court

960 A.2d 1140

2008 ME 176

ESTATE OF Thelma M. MILLER.

Docket: Wal-07-530

Supreme Judicial Court of Maine.

Argued: October 29, 2008.

Decided: December 4, 2008.

Robert E. Sandy, Jr., Esq. (orally), Sherman & Sandy, Waterville, ME, for Robert L. Gray.

David E. Bernier, Esq. (orally), Marden Dubord Bernier & Stevens, Waterville, ME, for Roselyn Bean, personal representative of the Estate of Thelma Miller.

Panel: SAUFLEY, C.J., and CLIFFORD, ALEXANDER, LEVY, SILVER, MEAD, and GORMAN, JJ.

MEAD, J.

[¶ 1] Robert Gray appeals from a judgment entered by the Waldo County Probate Court (Longley, J.) finding that a checking account and a savings account were assets of his late mother's estate, and ordering him to turn over the proceeds of the accounts with interest to the estate's personal representative. He also appeals the court's denial of his request for attorney fees. Gray contends that the accounts were not estate assets because they were joint accounts to which he held a right of survivorship. The personal representative, who sued Gray to recover the accounts, argues that the Probate Court correctly found that Thelma Miller's uncontested will controls their distribution. We vacate the judgment with respect to the savings account, and otherwise affirm.

I. FACTS AND PROCEDURE

[¶ 2] Thelma Miller died testate on March 28, 2004, at the age of ninety. Her will, signed on December 21, 1994, and naming her daughter Roselyn Bean as personal representative of her estate, was filed in the Waldo County Probate Court.

[¶ 3] Neither party contests the validity of the will. There is one provision at issue, which states:

I. I direct that my bills, debts, funeral expenses, and expenses of administration be paid, to the extent possible, from the cash, bank accounts, and certificates of deposit which stand in my name as of the date of my death. After all such payments have been satisfied, I give, devise, and bequeath all of the rest, residue and remainder of my cash, bank accounts, and of my Certificates of Deposit to my three children, PAULINE FERNALD of Waterville, Maine, ROSELYN BEAN of Belfast, Maine, and ROBERT GRAY who lives part of the time in Bath, Maine and part of the time with me in Searsport, Maine, provided they survive me.

[¶ 4] Thelma Miller left two accounts at People's Heritage Bank (now TD Banknorth) that are in dispute: a checking account containing $110,665.36, and a savings account containing $24,095.54. The parties agreed that a third account, a certificate of deposit worth $22,463.02, was an estate asset. At the time of Miller's death, the bank statement for these accounts was being mailed to "Thelma M. Miller or Robert L. Gray" at her home address.

[¶ 5] In April 2004, Bean, Gray, and their sister met with the attorney who was then legal counsel for the estate. At the meeting Gray acknowledged that the checking and savings accounts contained his mother's money; he said that he had access to the accounts to help her pay the bills. At trial, Gray testified that he did not make any transactions in the accounts while Miller was alive. He did help her keep her check register, and in her later years he wrote out checks for her that she would then sign.

[¶ 6] Following the meeting with the estate's attorney, there was conflict between the siblings in having Miller's property inventoried, and over her funeral arrangements. In June 2004 the estate's attorney wrote to Gray, advising him that an inventory was necessary, and asking him to sign a form so the bank would give Bean, as personal representative, access to the checking and savings accounts. Soon after, Gray went to the bank and signed a "personal account maintenance form" removing Miller's name from the accounts. In October 2004, Gray moved the money in the two accounts to another bank, seeking "a better interest rate."

[¶ 7] In May 2005, Bean, in her capacity as personal representative of the estate, filed a three-count complaint against Gray in the Waldo County Probate Court. The complaint asked the court to declare that the checking and savings accounts were assets of the estate on one of three grounds: (1) they were not joint accounts; (2) if they were, Gray became a joint owner through an improvident transfer; or (3) Gray's retention of the accounts constituted an unjust enrichment.

[¶ 8] Nearly two years of discovery and pretrial proceedings followed, culminating in a trial held over four days in the spring and summer of 2007. In its written judgment, the court implicitly found that the checking account was not a joint account, and found that the savings account, although jointly owned by Robert Gray, was nevertheless an estate asset by virtue of the intention declared in Thelma Miller's will. The court ordered Gray to turn over the proceeds of the accounts to Bean with accrued interest. Because of its ruling that both accounts were estate assets, the court briefly discussed but did not decide Bean's claims of an improvident transfer or an unjust enrichment. Finally, the court declined to award Gray attorney fees due to what it found to be his "dilatory behaviors" during the litigation. This appeal followed.

II. DISCUSSION

[¶ 9] We review the trial court's factual findings for clear error, and its application of the applicable law to those facts de novo. Estate of Fournier, 2006 ME 89, ¶ 5, 902 A.2d 852, 853. In general, a court probating an estate should "discover and make effective the intent of a decedent in the distribution of his property." 18-A M.R.S. 1-102(b)(2) (2007). When a joint account with a right of survivorship is left by a decedent, however, the probate code is more specific:

Sums remaining on deposit at the death of a party to a joint account belong to the surviving party or parties as against the estate of the decedent unless there is clear and convincing evidence of a different intention at the time the account is created.

18-A M.R.S. 6-104(a) (2007).

[¶ 10] The required "clear and convincing evidence" of an intention to override the right of survivorship cannot be supplied by a subsequent will. 18-A M.R.S. 6-104(e) (2007);¹ see Estate of Cormier, 580 A.2d 157, 158 (Me.1990) (citing section 6-104(e) in holding that the Probate Court "gerred in relying on the will as clear and convincing evidence of a contrary intention" when determining ownership of a joint savings account).

[¶ 11] Given these statutory provisions, there were two issues for the Probate Court to resolve: (1) whether Robert Gray was a joint owner of Thelma Miller's checking and savings accounts; and (2) if so, whether there is clear and convincing evidence, apart from Miller's will, that when Miller created the accounts she intended to pass them following her death other than to Gray as the surviving owner.

A. Checking Account

[¶ 12] At trial, a copy of the front side of a signature card opening the checking account was admitted in evidence; the sole account holder listed was Thelma Miller and the card bore only her signature. The card was undated, however a bank statement showed that the account was opened sometime before September 1994.

[¶ 13] A representative of the bank testified that prior to the system now in use, new accounts were opened with a signature card, which was "a record of ownership of the account," and "the controlling document." She said that the signature card for Thelma Miller's checking account showed her to be the sole owner, and that it did not indicate any right of survivorship. The representative also said that to change an account's ownership, positive action on the part of the account owner was required that would result in a document kept with the original signature card; she saw no such document in the bank's records.

[¶ 14] To counter this evidence suggesting that Miller was the checking account's sole owner, Gray established that the bank statement for the account issued in October 1994 was addressed only to Thelma Miller, but for the following month, November 1994, the addressee changed to "Thelma M. Miller or Robert L. Gray." The bank representative testified it was reasonable to infer that the appearance of the words "or Robert L. Gray" on the statement meant that the account owner had initiated a change making the account jointly owned. The representative said that if the statement's mailing address was simply being changed, the bank would use the phrase "care of," not the word "or," which was used to designate joint ownership with a right of survivorship.

[¶ 15] The representative said that the bank would not put someone's name on the account without written documentation, however the "account maintenance form" now used to make such changes is only kept for twenty-four months, after which only the electronic record remains. In this case she saw no evidence of a bank error, and inferred that Thelma Miller went to the bank and asked to have Robert Gray added to the account as a joint owner. Notwithstanding the representative's inference, however, she was clear that the signature card rather than the bank statement is the controlling document for determining account ownership.

[¶ 16] Robert Gray testified that he had never seen a document making him a joint owner of the checking account, and he considered the money in the account to belong to his mother. He said that he had never spoken to her about the addition of his name to the statement, about the account's ownership, or about its disposition after her death. Gray said that he had never made any transactions in the account while Miller was alive.

[¶ 17] The Probate Court determined that the checking account was an estate asset based on the signature card, which it found "contains the key information regarding the type of account created and serves as a bank's record of ownership." Although the bank representative's testimony was somewhat contradictory regarding the evidence of sole ownership established by the signature card versus the inference of...