Mississippi Supreme Court: Marriage Alone Does Not Create Presumption of Undue Influence

The Mississippi Supreme Court recently extended the holding of Genna v. Harrington to inter vivos gifts, holding that marriage alone does not create the presumption of undue influence.

I wrote about the Mississippi Court of Appeals decision in this case last year (see No Presumption of Undue Influence between Spouses). The case involved Patricia Langston’s decision to name her husband, Mansfield, as a joint tenant with right of survivorship on her home and a $200,000 certificate of deposit.  Patricia did not leave anything to Mansfield under her will.

When Patricia died, her estate sought to set aside the two transfers to Mansfield, claiming that they were the product of Mansfield’s undue influence over Patricia.  This raised the issue of a confidential relationship, which is where the real battle lies in undue influence cases.  If a confidential relationship exists, the person is presumed to have exerted undue influence over any gifts to that person. This puts the alleged influencer in the position of being guilty until proven innocent.

Relying on prior decisions, the court defined a confidential relationship to mean:

A relation between two people in which one person is in a position to exercise a dominant influence upon the other because of the latter’s dependency upon the former, arising either from weakness of mind or body, or through trust.

Mississippi courts have traditionally drawn a distinction between testamentary (at death) and inter vivos (during life) gifts:

[The] presumption of undue influence only arises in the context of gifts by will when there has been some abuse of the confidential relationship, such as some involvement in the preparation or execution of the will. On the other hand, with a gift inter vivos, there is an automatic presumption of undue influence even without abuse of the confidential relationship. Such gifts are presumptively invalid.

But the Mississippi Supreme Court has declined to apply the presumption of undue influence to the marital context.  As the Court explained in Genna v. Harrington:[1]

It is undoubtedly true that a husband or a wife may exercise undue influence upon the other spouse, but the mere fact that there is a close relationship between the parties in a marriage does not mean that one’s influence upon another is undue influence. The influence which a loyal wife, by her virtues, kindnesses and devotion, gains over her husband’s affection and conduct, whereby a husband is caused to make a will in her favor, is no ground for refusing to admit the will to probate.

A wife may be caused by her love and affection to make a will in favor of her husband in the same way.  In order to set a will aside upon the grounds of undue influence on the part of a spouse, it must be shown that the devisee spouse used undue methods for the purpose of overcoming the free and unrestrained will of the testator so as to control his acts and to prevent him from being a free agent.

In other words, there are many reasons other than undue influence that would cause one spouse to provide for another in a will, so the court won’t assume that something suspicious is going on merely because the parties happen to be married.  But, as the quoted language indicates, Genna applies specifically to testamentary transfers.  The question of its application to inter vivos transfers remained open.  This was what the Mississippi Supreme Court had to decide in this case.

The court had little trouble in extending Genna to inter vivos gifts, holding that “a confidential relationship between a surviving spouse and a deceased spouse does not create a presumption that the surviving spouse used undue influence with respect to inter vivos gifts and transfers.”  And it would be hard to come up with a convincing argument for why this should not be the case.  If a husband would be naturally inclined to leave something to his wife in his will, why wouldn’t he be inclined to transfer assets to her during his lifetime?

This case brings needed clarity to this area of law and provides guidance to chancery courts on how to apply the burden of proof in undue influence cases involving husbands and wives.  The full text of the case is available in the link below.

In re Estate of Langston, 2008-CT-01090-SCT (Feb. 24, 2011)