Brief Fact Summary. Appellants appeal from a decree admitting decedent’s will to probate based on the ground that the decedent was insane when her will was executed.
Synopsis of Rule of Law. A person may have sufficient mental capacity generally to execute a will but may be suffering from an insane delusion so as to cause a particular provision in a will, or perhaps the entire will to fail for lack of testamentary capacity.
Issue. Whether the decedent’s will was the product of her insanity?
Held. Yes. Judgment affirmed.
Decedent’s disease seemed to have become well developed by 1936. She had been a member of the Women’s Party for eleven years at that time but the evidence doesn’t show that she had taken great interest in it. The court believed it was her paranoiac condition, especially her insane delusions about the male, that led her to leave her estate to the National Women’s Party.
Discussion. The Master who heard the case in court found that the decedent’s comments she had written in books and on photos of her parents demonstrated “incontrovertibly her morbid aversion to men” and “feminism to a neurotic extreme.” The court found that characterization was not strong enough to conclude the decedent suffered from an insane delusions.