In re Estate of Carpenter

If you are ever in a Florida will contest, this is the case both lawyers will cite. Not the celebrity estates, not the Supreme Court of the United States — a widow from Winter Garden who died at 52 in a Daytona Beach hospital in September 1966.

Coketine Bray Carpenter left four grown children: a daughter, Mary, and three sons, Ben, Sam, and Bill. On September 1, 1966 she signed a will leaving her entire estate outright to Mary. It gave the sons nothing. Four days later she died.

Ben and Bill contested. The County Judge's Court of Orange County found the will had been procured by undue influence and refused it probate. The Fourth District reversed. The Supreme Court of Florida took the case because Florida's own decisions could not agree on one question — and answered it in an opinion that has structured every Florida undue-influence case since.

Four days, one telephone call, and a stranger's lawyer

The county judge's findings, quoted at length in the Supreme Court's opinion, are worth reading because they are the anatomy of the problem.

Mrs. Carpenter had been widowed since 1953 and lived alone in Winter Garden, handling her own business and household affairs. In the summer of 1966 she developed cirrhosis of the liver. The judge found that she was gravely ill, depressed, and mentally impaired, that she had been drinking heavily for some time and that the cause of her death was the breakdown of her body from excessive alcohol consumption, and that she was being given barbiturates from before the will was ordered until she died. Three days before the will was signed, her physician had concluded she was terminal.

The judge also found that she had repeatedly said she intended to leave her estate equally to her four children, that no event had intervened to change that, that she had never made any other will, and that intestacy would have divided the estate four ways — a fact she was presumed to know.

Mary was a schoolteacher in Daytona Beach. She arranged her mother's admission to a Daytona Beach hospital on August 28. On August 30 she telephoned her own attorney in Orlando to say her mother wanted a will naming Mary as sole beneficiary and executrix. On August 31 she called again to press the urgency. The lawyer drove to Daytona Beach the next day.

The lawyer did his job carefully. He questioned Mrs. Carpenter out of Mary's presence, satisfied himself she understood that her three sons were being excluded, then arranged two witnesses — one a physician — read the will aloud, questioned her again, and kept the executed document himself. None of the other children learned the will existed until at or shortly before their mother's death.

The seven active-procurement factors

Florida law already held that a presumption of undue influence arises when a substantial beneficiary under a will occupies a confidential relationship with the testator and was active in procuring the will. What nobody had written down was what “active in procuring” looks like.

The Court set out seven criteria drawn from the earlier Florida cases:

• (a) Presence at the execution. Was the beneficiary in the room when the will was signed?
• (b) Presence when the testator expressed a desire to make a will.
• (c) Recommending the attorney who drew the will.
• (d) Knowing the contents of the will before it was executed.
• (e) Giving instructions on preparation of the will to the drafting attorney.
• (f) Securing the witnesses to the will.
• (g) Safekeeping the will after execution.

The Court was careful about what the list is. The criteria are not exclusive, contestants are not required to prove all of them, and the Court expected that it would be “the rare case in which all the criteria will be present.” It set them out, in its own words, “primarily in the hope that they will aid trial judges in looking for those warning signals pointing to active procurement of a will by beneficiary.”

On the facts, at least four were present: Mrs. Carpenter expressed her wish to Mary, Mary secured the attorney, Mary instructed him on the contents, Mary put it on an urgent footing, and Mary was present for part of the questioning. The Fourth District had thought Mary's role was “primarily as a messenger on behalf of her mother.” The Supreme Court's answer was jurisdictional rather than factual: that interpretation was the trial court's to make, not the reviewing court's.

On the confidential relationship, the Court leaned on Quinn v. Phipps (1927): the term is very broad, the origin of the confidence is immaterial, and it reaches informal relations “wherever one man trusts in and relies upon another.” Mary's own testimony that her mother relied on her heavily was enough.

What the presumption actually does

The reason the Supreme Court took the case was a genuine contradiction in Florida law. Its own earlier decisions said the presumption shifted the burden of proof to the will's proponent. The general Florida rule on presumptions, from Leonetti v. Boone, said a presumption shifts only the burden of going forward and never the risk of nonpersuasion. And the statute then in force, §732.31, put the burden of proof on the contestant once execution and attestation were proved.

The Court chose the general rule. Shifting the burden of proof, it reasoned, would raise the presumption “virtually to conclusive status”, because disproving undue influence is as hard as proving it — and that would take the weighing of evidence away from the trial judge, which is the most valuable thing a trial judge does in a non-jury case.

So the rule it announced was this: the presumption shifts to the beneficiary only the burden of coming forward with a reasonable explanation for their active role. Give a credible explanation and the presumption vanishes, and the judge decides on the greater weight of the evidence. But — and this is the part practitioners still quote — the facts that raised the presumption are themselves evidence of undue influence and stay in the case, supporting a permissible inference either way.

Mary's testimony satisfied that burden. The presumption vanished. But the Fourth District had gone further and held the remaining evidence legally insufficient, and on that the Supreme Court disagreed and quashed. The case was sent back to the county judge to decide the question over again on the weight of the evidence, without the presumption doing the work.

Justice McCain wrote. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Adkins and Boyd concurred; Justice Dekle agreed to the conclusion only. Rehearing was denied on November 4, 1971.