Seventh Circuit Holds that ERISA does not Preempt State “Slayer Statute”
February 9, 2018
Authored by: Meredith Jacobowitz, Jennifer Stokes and Jeffrey Russell
We turn once again to the sad and difficult task that plan administrators face when distributing the benefits of a participant who has been murdered by his or her designated beneficiary. Sad for obvious reasons. Difficult because ERISA and state law may provide different answers. ERISA directs a plan to honor a participant’s beneficiary designation—meaning that the murderer would receive the benefit. “Slayer statutes” prohibit the murderer from receiving a financial benefit from his or her victim, requiring the plan to disregard the beneficiary designation.
Our prior blog post suggested three strategies that a plan administrator might employ in the face of uncertainty: interpleader, receipt and refunding agreement, and affidavit of status. Under the interpleader approach, the plan administrator would pay the benefit into the registry of the court and join each potential claimant as a party defendant. Each claimant would then argue for receipt of the benefit, and the court would award the benefit and issue a judgment upon which the plan administrator may rely for protection against the losing claimants. This certainty comes at the cost and effort required by litigation in federal court.
A recent Seventh Circuit case involves just this approach. In Laborers’ Pension Fund v. Miscevice, No. 17-2022, the participant was killed by his wife. At the state criminal court proceeding, the court determined that the wife intended to kill her husband without legal justification but also that she was insane at the time and therefore not guilty of