Hiss v. Weik

McSherry, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. There is but one bill of exception in the record now before us, and the chief question which it raises is whether there was legally sufficient evidence offered by the caveator, the appellee here, to justify the trial Court in submitting the case to the jury. On May the sixth, 1879, the last will and testament of the late Bishop Ames, who died on April the twenty-fifth of that year, was admitted to probate by the Orphans’ Court of Baltimore City, and some twelve years thereafter his granddaughter, the appellee, upon attaining her majority, filed a caveat assailing is validity. Issues were framed and were finally tried before a jury in the Court of Common Pleas of Baltimore City.

The trial resulted in a verdict for the caveator upon the first and second issues, and for the caveatees upon the third issue. These issues were, first, as to whether the paper-writing purporting to be the will of Bishop Ames was his last will and testament; second, as to whether the same paper-writing had been procured by undue influence exercised and practiced upon the testator; and third, as to whether it had been procured by fraud. At the close of the evidence in the Court below the appellee presented two, and the appellants presented six, prayers for instructions to the jury. The appellee’s first prayer was granted, and her second was rejected.

The appellants’ first and second prayers were rejected, and ⁴⁴⁵ the remaining four were granted. The appellee’s instruction accurately defined undue influence as understood in its legal sense, and left to the jury to find from the evidence the existence of the facts necessary to constitute such an influence. The appellants’ first and second prayers asked the Court to withdraw the case from the jury upon the ground that there was no sufficient evidence that the will had been procured by undue influence. If the appellee’s instruction was properly granted, there was no error committed in rejecting the appellants’ first and second prayers; but if there was error in rejecting these latter, there was of necessity error in granting that of the appellee.

So, as already suggested, the controlling inquiry is, was there legally sufficient evidence, that is, competent evidence, tending to prove the issues, which ought to have gone to the jury? Or, stating the question conversely, was the evidence offered by the caveator, assuming it all to be true, as must be done when weighing its legal sufficiency upon a prayer of this character, so utterly inconclusive or devoid of probative force as not to enable an ordinary intelligent mind to draw a rational conclusion therefrom in support of the proposition sought to be maintained by it? The solution of this inquiry involves an examination of the evidence contained in the record. Before, however, proceeding to do this, it may not be amiss to observe that it is not our province under the law to determine whether the verdict of the jury was either right or wrong, or to decide whether the will ought or ought not to have been set aside.

And, even though we might be of opinion from the whole of the evidence before us, that the jury had reached an incorrect or mistaken conclusion of fact, we are without authority to disturb their verdict, if the Court below committed no error in its rulings upon the legal propositions submitted to it. The principles which must ⁴⁴⁶ control this Court, and the view from which we must approach a discussion of the case, are essentially and radically different from those which would be applicable and appropriate were we authorized to consider the propriety of the verdict upon a review of a motion for a new trial. Whether the jury ought to have found a verdict the wáy they did, or a different way, is a matter which the law gives us no jurisdiction to decide. As an appellate Court we cannot review the findings of the jury upon matters of fact, nor can we pass upon the comparative weight of the conflicting evidence submitted to them.

If no error of lato has been committed by the inferior Court in any of its rulings, the verdict of the jury, whether right or wrong, just or unjust, and even though it be directly against and in the very teeth and face of the preponderance of the evidence, cannot be interfered with here; and there is no power lodged elsewhere to set aside the verdict, except with the Judge before -whom the case was tried below. We have consequently to determine, not whether the jury ought, in view of the facts, to have stricken down the will, but whether there was any legally sufficient evidence in the case from which they could properly find, if they believed it to be true, that the will had been procured by undue influence. Jones, et al. vs. Jones, 45 Md., 144 ; Spencer vs. Trafford, 42 Md., 1 . Undue influence is that degree of importunity which deprives a testator of his free agency, which is such as he is too weak or too feeble to resist, and will render the instrument executed under its influence not his free and unconstrained act.

Davis vs. Calvert, 5 G. & J., 269 . It is closely allied to, and in many of its aspects strongly resembles, actual fraud, and like the latter, when most cunningly executed is exceedingly difficult to unmask. The results accomplished in a given case, the divergence of those results from the course which would ordinarily ⁴⁴⁷ and naturally be looked for, the situation of the party taking benefits under a will towards the person who has executed it, and the iranteeedent relations to and dealings with each other, the legitimate, but unrecognized claims of others upon the bounty of the testator and their dependence upon him, the instincts of justice of which every unbiased mind is sensible, the natural ties of parental affection, together with all the circumstances surrounding the transaction under investigation, and the inferences legitimately deducible from them, often furnish, in the absence of direct evidence (which from the very nature and secrecy of the wrong itself, is rarely obtainable,) ample ground for the conclusion that undue influence has been used to accomplish an end which may be gross in its injustice, and whose very existence cannot be satisfactorily accounted for, except upon the hypothesis that undue influence has produced it. Grove vs. Spiker, 72 Md., 300 .

Turning now to the facts of the case, it appears that Bishop Ames was upwards of seventy-three years of age when he died. He executed the will before us on April the seventh, 1879, and died on the twenty-fifth of the same month. He had become physically feeble, and, whilst his mental faculties remained relatively clear, his will had lost its former strength and power as he himself appreciated when he stated to the Rev. Dr. Price, upon being urged by the latter to correct by his episcopal authority something that needed to be righted in the church: “It is too late, my time has passed; ‘the grasshopper has become a burden.7 77 He had been of robust frame and of vigorous intellect, and his long and faithful service in the cause of religion marked him as an eminently just and upright man. He had three children.

One, a son who had been an officer in the army, but who, when the will was made, was, and for some time prior thereto had been, insane; another, an invalid ⁴⁴⁸ daughter who survived her father but a short while; and the third, a married daughter, and she and her husband are the caveatees in the case and are the appellants in this Court. Bishop Ames also left a widow — his second wife — surviving him, but she died some yeai’s ago. The value of his personal estate was upwards of fifty-five thousand dollars, and he owned besides this considerable real estate, both in and near Baltimore, and in and near Chicago. By his will he gave to his widow an annuity of two thousand dollars payable quarterly; to his invalid daughter, an annuity of six hundred dollars; to his insane son, and that son’s dependent daughter, nothing; but to his married daughter his entire estate.

When the will was made the son was a widower with one child, a daughter of nine or ten years of age, and she (her father having died some years ago) is the caveator assailing the will. Whilst the gross inequality of this will — the palpable injustice of its provisions — which absolutely cut off an insane son upon whom a motherless and helpless child was dependent, and gave to an invalid daughter a mere annual pittance out of a large and valuable estate, would not alone be sufficient to annul the will, yet, such a disposition by an aged and feeble testator furnishes intrinsic evidence involving the will in suspicion, and was competent to be considered by the jury in connection with other circumstances, in passing upon the issue of undue influence. Davis vs. Calvert, 5 G. & J., 301 . It is a reasonable assumption that an unbiased mind will not voluntarily do an apparently unjust act without a sufficient or satisfactory motive, because, as observed by one of the most philosophical writers on the law of evidence, “there must pre-exist a motive for every voluntary action of a rational being. * * * * Man is not the passive subject of necessity or chance; nor are his moral judgments merely the abstractions of logic; ⁴⁴⁹ on the contrary, he is endowed with instincts,