© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
(April 22) – A 72-year-old man wrongfully convinced his terminally ill second wife of 24 years to revise her will on her deathbed to favor him over an earlier version that favored her three children, a Dallas jury ruled Tuesday.
After an hour of deliberation, the six-person jury unanimously ruled that 68-year-old Jean Knight Baty lacked the proper mental capacity when she signed the revised will a day before her Jan. 26, 2014 death, and therefore the new will should be invalidated.
The deathbed will gave her husband, Donald Baty, control of the bulk of the couple’s assets and a multimillion-dollar estate. This new will was contrary to a 1992 will Ms. Baty signed that created a family trust with terms that more directly benefitted her three children and grandchildren from a previous marriage.
Dallas lawyer Brian Hail, who represented Ms. Baty’s middle son at trial, said Tuesday’s verdict brought relief and satisfaction that the jury system works and peace of mind to his client, Richard Nelson Knight, who fought the legal battle on behalf of his two siblings, Preston Rinard Knight and Caroline Knight.
“If you ask anyone about signing a will on a deathbed, they want to recoil,” said Hail, a partner at Gruber Elrod Johansen Hail Shank. “In the medical condition [Ms. Baty] was in, she was in no position to be signing a will.”
Mr. Baty’s lawyer, Tammy Wood of Bell Nunnally & Martin, could not be reached for comment.
Hail said the family will continue to pursue and add to existing breach of fiduciary duty claims against Mr. Baty, who is currently the trustee of the family trust.
In the last years of her life, Ms. Baty suffered from rheumatoid lung disease (RLD), a condition that caused her chronic shortness of breath and frequent bouts of pneumonia, many of which led to frequent hospitalizations, court documents say.
By 2012, Ms. Baty could no longer walk, was on oxygen full-time and was taking daily medications through an IV. Her husband was her primary caretaker.
Ms. Baty’s worst fear was that she would suffocate to death. When her health severely worsened in January 2014 and she became too ill to even leave her house, she decided to bring in hospice care to her high-rise home in the Turtle Creek area of Dallas to aid her in dying, court documents show.
Mr. Baty had called Ms. Baty’s former estate attorney around six months before her death to draw up a new will that would “effectively disinherit her children in his favor,” according to court documents, but Ms. Baty’s frequent hospitalizations delayed Mr. Baty’s attempts to change the will.
When the will had still not been revised when hospice care arrived at the Baty home on Jan. 25, 2014, Mr. Baty summoned the estate lawyers to execute a new will, which Ms. Baty signed while under the influence of strong pain and anti-anxiety medications, according to court documents.
None of her children were present to witness the signing of the new will, Hail said.
The primary change in the new will allowed Mr. Baty, as trustee, to use money from the trust for himself, even if he had not used all of his money first, which Hail argued at trial allowed him to drain the funds for his own use so that none of Ms. Baty’s children would benefit from the trust. The 1992 version of the will did not let Mr. Baty distribute any of the trust’s funds to himself until he exhausted all of his own funds first, Hail said.
By the time Preston Knight got to see his mother (Mr. Baty didn’t allow him to visit until the afternoon after the new will had been executed), she was “unconscious from the morphine and not aware that he was there” so he “never had the chance to tell his mother goodbye,” court documents say. Ms. Baty passed away the following morning, less than 24 hours after the new will went into effect.
Court documents show Mr. Baty testified that he and his wife had discussions about the terms of the new will “well in advance” of the time she was on her deathbed. He also testified that he and Ms. Baty were on good terms with her two children, Meredith and Preston, but not with the plaintiff, Nelson – who seldom visited his mother despite living six blocks away. He testified that Baty was unresponsive when Nelson Knight saw her not because she was unconscious, but because she did not want to talk to him.
Baty testified that he called Knight so he could say his final goodbyes – even though Ms. Baty specifically told her husband not to call him – and that he requested for the nurses to not overdose her on pain medications or do anything that would make her unable to talk to her children when they visited.
He also testified that his wife was “cognizant” before the estate attorney spoke to her about the will and that Ms. Baty did not have access to pain medication at the time the new will was executed. He said the estate attorney told him she asked Ms. Baty whether she was mentally and physically capable of answering the questions needed to execute the new will (Mr. Baty said he was not in the room at the time the estate attorney questioned Ms. Baty).
Hail said he got involved in the case because he and Mr. Knight, who is a criminal defense lawyer in Dallas, coach their sons’ flag football team together. Hail said this was not his first probate case, but it was his first will dispute to take to trial.
“What is most satisfying to me about the practice of law is getting the chance to stand up and be the spokesperson for my client who doesn’t have the ability to do it for himself,” Hail said. “It has been a difficult process physically and mentally to get to this point.”
The six-day trial took place in Dallas Probate Court No. 1 before Judge Brenda Thompson.
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