Weber v. Supreme Tent of Knights of Maccabees of the World

• Citation: 172 N.Y. 490,65 N.E. 258
• Parties: WEBER v. SUPREME TENT OF KNIGHTS OF MACCABEES OF THE WORLD.
• Decision Date: 18 November 1902
• Court: New York Court of Appeals

172 N.Y. 490

65 N.E. 258

WEBER

v.SUPREME TENT OF KNIGHTS OF MACCABEES OF THE WORLD.

Court of Appeals of New York.

Nov. 18, 1902.

Appeal from supreme court, appellate division, Fourth department.

Action by Amelia Weber against the Supreme Tent of the Knights of the Maccabees of the World. From a judgment of the appellate division (70 N. Y. Supp. 1150) affirming a judgment for plaintiff, defendant appeals. Affirmed.

James L. Quackenbush, for appellant.

George D. Forsyth, for respondent.

PARKER, C. J.

The judgment in this action awards $2,000 to plaintiff as beneficiary under a policy of insurance issued to her husband by defendant, a fraternal mutual benefit society organized upon the lodge plan. The defense interposed was that the insured took his own life, and hence a recovery could not be had, because at the time of his death the by-laws and rules of the order provided that, should an insured commit suicide within five years from the time of admission into the order, whether sane or insane, the contract should be void. At the time Weber joined the order and received his policy, the rules of defendant and the contract of insurance provided that the contract should be void if the party committed suicide within one year, whether sane or insane. Before Weber's death, defendant undertook to amend its by-laws and rules so as to extend the time from one year to five within which self-destruction, whether the result of an insane act or an intentional one, should operate to destroy the policy; and it insists the amendment was legally accomplished, and that the self-destruction of the defendant within the five years, although an insane act, operated to deprive this plaintiff of all right of recovery. Plaintiff challenges the alleged amendment, and insists that it was not legally accomplished, and hence is not available as a defense. But the disposition which we deem it necessary to make of this appeal renders it unnecessary to pass upon that question, and hence we shall assume, without deciding, that defendant took at the steps necessary to bring about this change in its laws.

This brings us directly to the question whether defendant had the power, by amendment long subsequent to the taking out of the policy by its member, to deprive his beneficiary of all rights under the policy in the event of unintentional self-destruction on the part of the insured; for in the eye of the law the taking of life by an insane person, whether it be his own or that of some other person, is not an act for which he is responsible. In the Century Dictionary a suicide is defined to be: ‘One who commits suicide; at common law, one who, being of the years of discretion and sound mind, destroys himself.’ And the act itself is defined to be: ‘Designedly destroying one's own life. ‘To constitute suicide at common law, the person must be of years of discretion and of sound mind.’' This distinction was evidently in the minds of the draftsmen of the rules of the defendant, for they provided that members who...