[CHAPTER VI.]
CIVIL JURISPRUDENCE.
The civil branch of the jurisprudence of our subject is more complex than the criminal. Life assurance companies naturally object to have to pay sums of money for suicidal deaths, when these are proved to have occurred in persons who have never shown any mental derangement, and who may have had reasons for providing a considerable sum of money for their families, even at the expense of forfeiting their own further concern in this world. Such fraudulent suicides have taken place, just as some men have not hesitated to risk being judicially executed for murder, committed to obtain sums of money and other valuables.
Our English Judges have, unfortunately, not been unanimous in their decisions respecting the forfeiture of insurances by voluntary death; and the assurance companies have further complicated the matter by the insertion of peculiar clauses in their policies, and by using alternative phrases, meaning suicide, which the law courts have held to infer different notions.
It has always been the custom to insert in policies of life assurance the proviso that the death of the assured by suicide should render the policy void. This was understood to mean that felo-de-se voided the policy.
But it became the constant practice of Coroner’s juries to find that persons who had been proved to have destroyed themselves were suffering from “temporary insanity”: they thus avoided a verdict of felo-de-se; hence arose the necessity of an understanding whether or not “Suicide whilst insane” did or did not vitiate a policy. In equity, of course, such a death should not do so, because the death occurs without the voluntary determination of a healthy mind, and no one can contract himself out of the possibility of some day losing his reason.
The difficulty might never have arisen, but for this unfortunate straining of the word insanity to cover all cases of suicide.
On the Continent, in many States, this injudicious mode of regarding suicides does not exist; when madmen kill themselves, their madness is registered; and when persons whom no one has ever noticed to be unable to manage their affairs, and whose mental state has not been disturbed, until they have preferred death to life, on account of some loss or annoyance, their voluntary deaths are registered as such. In those states unseemly squabbles between assurance companies and executors are quite rare.
To dispute and refuse payment, however, was found by the companies not altogether a profitable business, because such cases gave rise to much discussion and more misrepresentation, and the litigating company was apt to be avoided by persons about to choose a company to insure with.
Several cases which appeared to be attempts at fraud have been the subject of investigation in courts of law. See reports of the suits of Borrodaile v. Hunter, 1841; Schwabe v. Clift, 1845; Isett v. The American Insurance Company; and The St. Louis Insurance Company v. Graves.