Court says son who killed mother cannot inherit estate

Kfar Saba Family Court says man who stabbed his mother 66 times is not entitled to her estate.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
crime scene_521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
crime scene_521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Kfar Saba Family Court has decided that a man who stabbed his mother to death is not entitled to inherit her estate, according to a closed-door ruling released for publication on Tuesday.
The man, whose name has not been released as is standard for family law proceedings, is identified only as “Alef.”
Alef was indicted for murder and attempted murder after he stabbed his mother 66 times and then attempted to kill his brother, seriously injuring him.
By law, a person formally convicted of intentionally causing a person’s death or attempting to do so cannot profit from that crime by inheriting the estate of his victim.
However, Alef contested his brother’s request that he be prohibited from sharing his late-mother’s inheritance, arguing that he had not been formally convicted of murder and so he is legally entitled to inherit.
Alef was tried for murder in March 2010, but although the court held that he had committed the offenses attributed to him, his murder trial was terminated when a psychiatric evaluation determined he was mentally ill at the time of the murder and could not be held criminally responsible.
Instead, the court ordered that Alef be hospitalized in a psychiatric facility.
Alef’s brother argued that Alef should not be allowed to inherit even though the court had not formally pronounced Alef guilty, adding that inheritance law requires that a formal guilty verdict be made before removing an heir from a will to ensure that a defendant would not be prevented from inheriting should a court find him innocent.
After a detailed analysis of inheritance law, Judge Binyamin Izraeli said that although Alef was not actually pronounced guilty, neither was he formally acquitted, a judgment that “has the connotation of removing the moral stain” of the crime. Therefore, the judge said, while Alef had not been held criminally liable for murder, he was still morally liable for his actions and could not receive the inheritance.