In Riggs v Palmer, 115 NY 506 (1889) New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, held that equity trumps the literal meaning of the statute of wills, and prevents a murderer from benefiting from his crime. The murderer, Elmer Palmer was thus enjoined from inheriting the sizable estate left to him by his grandfather, Frances Palmer, the murder victim. Others have read Riggs for the general equitable principle that one cannot profit from his own wrong.

The Court, quoting Aristotle, stated that “[e]quity is a correction of the law where it is defective owing to its universitality.”

New York, unlike most jurisdictions did not have a statute specifically addressing the rules disinheriting the homicidal heir. Now come the geniuses in the NY Legislature to the rescue by enacting another law under the umbrella of the “Full Employment for Lawyers Act.” They passed a law [NY EPTL 4-1.6] stating that a person convicted of first or second degree murder cannot inherit money in a joint bank account that was not contributed by him/her.

This opens a can of worms and seems to remove the equitable component. What if, for instance, a murderous heir by all indications plotted the killing, but ended up pleading to manslaughter?

Does the statute by expressing only joint bank accounts, exclude all other instances (of which the legislature was obviously aware) where a murderous heir could inherit?

I did not research the specific situation presented by this Washington case, but with the facts as presented, if I were the judge, I would “correct the law” and enjoin the killer from inheriting any part of the estate, and leave the $800,000.00 won in the lawsuit against the municipality as part of the estate to be distributed as if the son predeceased the testator.

One of the main problems with many of the “absurd” cases that make it to Overlawyered, is that laws are enacted by those that don’t know the rules, law is practiced by those that don’t know the rules, judges don’t know the rules, thus completing the viscous cycle where the rules themselves become fluid with differing viscosities depending on the area of law.

The Full employment for Lawyers Act, however will remain alive and well.

But the statute first has to be ambiguous.

The statute in Washington, RCW 11.84.010, requires that the killing be both “willful and unlawful.”

The Hoge Court ruled that, notwithstanding Hoge’s acquittal, the killing was still “unlawful,” but remanded the case for further findings on the degree of mens rea required to find “wilfullness.” I think the decision makes sense in light of the less-than-perfect statutory language.

I couldn’t agree more. Ruling based on what a judge thinks the law “should” be is called judicial activism.

If a law is unjust, the people must take steps to right the unjust law. A judge’s resposibility is to interpret the law, not decide what’s fair. The rule of law must be followed, even if it has unfortunate consequences.

It’s no different than the example of where the police perform an unlawful search and seizure, and an obviously guilty party gets away with a crime due to inadmissable evidence. Everyone knows the accused committed the crime, but all of the evidence that links the accused with the crime has to be omitted, and the accused walks. A judge can’t just say, “Well, we all know he did it, and the police didn’t mean to violate his rights and perform the illegal search, so we’ll admit the evidence anyway.”

While I agree that Hoge shouldn’t get anything, I’ve heard of stranger things happening.