Property Law Hypotheticals

Law academics are renowned for their creation of bizarre and unlikely hypotheticals. Yet as usual, life is stranger than fiction. When land is owned by two (or more) people in joint tenancy, there is an automatic right of survivorship (if one of the joint tenants dies, his/her share is automatically passed to the remaining joint tenants). Well here's a fact pattern you don't expect to find in your Property casebook:

If A and B, joint tenants, die in a common disaster and there is "no sufficient evidence" of the order of death, Uniform Simultaneous Death Act Section 3 (1953) provides that one-half the property is distributed as if A survived and one-half as if B survived. Suppose that A and B are killed while riding in a car struck by a train. When witnesses arrive, there are no signs of life in A; B is decapitated and blood is gushing from her neck in spurts. Does B survive A? See Gray v. Sawyer, 247 S.W.2d 496 (Ny. 1952).

For anyone who shares my morbid curiosity, here's the text of the decision (which was not on the merits, but rather on whether the witness testimony was sufficient new evidence to mandate a new trial):

The newly discovered evidence is that Mrs. Ruth Hickey heard the noise of the accident, turned and saw what had happened and then went immediately to the scene. She found Mrs. Gugel decapitated, her head lying about ten feet from her body, which was actively bleeding 'from near her neck and blood was gushing from her body in spurts.' Her legs were crossed but thereafter straightened out.

Realistically, a person is dead when there has been a complete decapitation of the head, as was proved in the original case; but upon a hypothetical question submitting the above statements of Mrs. Hickey and, as well, the terrific mangling of the body of her husband and other conditions relating to both, several doctors expressed the opinion that Mrs. Gugel had survived her husband for a fleeting moment. The doctors told the court that a body is not dead so long as there is a heart beat and that may be evidenced by the gushing of blood in spurts. This is so though the brain may have quit functioning.

A horrible accident that has survived 51 years to become a very strange law school casebook footnote.