Stanfill v. Defenbach, 15080.
| Decision Date | 04 January 1957 |
| Docket Number | No. 15080.,15080. |
| Citation | 239 F.2d 685 |
| Parties | E. J. STANFILL, as Trustee and Elfrieda May, Appellants, v. Ralph B. DEFENBACH, as Trustee, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
S. Dean Arnold, Clarkston, Wash., C. C. Rowan, Spokane, Wash., for appellants.
Paine, Lowe, Coffin & Herman, Harold W. Coffin, Alan P. O'Kelly, Spokane, Wash., for appellee.
Before DENMAN, Chief Judge, and POPE and CHAMBERS, Circuit Judges.
This is an appeal by Stanfill from a judgment of the District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, Northern Division, for Defenbach in a civil action of interpleader brought by the Sun Life Assurance Corporation of Canada against disputing claimants to life insurance policies issued to one Robert F. Weyen. 28 U.S.C. § 1335. The insurance company deposited in the registry of the court the total sum due on the policies. Jurisdiction is based on diversity of citizenship. The applicable law is that of the State of Washington.
Defenbach contends that this court lacks jurisdiction because no appeal was filed until February 15, 1956. This is because although the judgment was entered December 30, 1955, and the transcript shows no more than that the court on January 19, 1956, denied a motion to amend the findings, conclusions of law and judgment and the motion is not shown to have been made within the ten days of Rule 59(b), Fed.Rules Civ.Proc. 28 U.S.C.A. Hence the contention continues it is not affirmatively shown that the time to appeal was advanced to January 19, 1956.
We regard this contention as reprehensibly frivolous. Defenbach well knew that the motion was served on him on January 5, 1956. He nevertheless put Stanfill to the trouble of invoking Rule 75 and supplying the data by a certified supplemental record from the Clerk of the District Court showing that to be fact, and this court to waste its time in disposing of the contention.
Stanfill contends that the court erred in holding valid a trust of Weyen's life insurance policies to secure his indebtedness against a prior trust of the policies in favor of his children, the terms of which the court construed as giving precedence to the second transaction.
Robert Weyen, then 35 years of age, divorced his wife on September 22, 1953, and agreed to pay $200.00 monthly to her to support their two minor children, Daryl and Carolyn. At the same time he executed a trust in favor of the two children naming Stanfill as Trustee. The period of the trust was 15 years and the res consisted of life insurance policies, eight of which were with Sun Life, of which seven are involved herein. On four of these policies Weyen had borrowed moneys from the insurance company before the Stanfill Trust was executed. At the same time Weyen created the Stanfill Trust he executed a will in which it was stated that because of the trust Weyen made no provision therein for his children, except that, should the policies lapse or become void, they were to get $10,000 under the will. The trust instrument contained a reservation of rights in Weyen concerning the policies later considered.
On November 16, 1954, Weyen created a second trust, this for the benefit of his creditors whose debts were unpaid and immediately collectible, naming one Defenbach as trustee. The trust res included the seven policies of insurance here involved which were transferred to defendant with the power to exercise the policies' loan rights to secure moneys to pay the creditors. Such delivery to Defenbach was made, who thereafter exercised the loan rights on three of the policies.
Weyen was a large scale logging operator, an unstable business requiring large expenditures in which one's continued solvency is necessary. He was a healthy man when he executed the Stanfill trust on September 22, 1953, as shown by his securing a life insurance policy in the following December. He contemplated continuing his business for the fifteen years of the Stanfill trust but was killed in an accident in April, 1955.
The words of the Defenbach trust are that Weyen "agrees to and does hereby mortgage and pledge to the trustee all his interest and equity in all his assets," which included the policies. The policies provide that:
"Subject to the rights of any assignee of record * * * the contractor may assign or pledge * * * every right * * * conferred by the policy."
The primary question on this appeal is whether the district court erred in holding that the reservation in the Stanfill trust empowered Weyen to assign the trust res to Defenbach for the benefit of creditors, with the power in the assignee (1) to secure loans from the insurance company on the policies and (2) to defeat the interest of the beneficiaries of the Stanfill trust in the death benefits of the policies to the extent of the claims of the creditors secured by the assignment. That reservation reads:
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