Professor John Mee:

It depends on the drafting. The current draft provides that a person cannot benefit from any property that the victim had an interest in but a life insurance policy does not operate in that way. I could take out a life insurance policy on a person and I could then murder that person. The victim does not have any interest in the policy so the wording would have to be different to cover that. When there is no law, there is flexibility in the sense that the judge can take the view that he or she has a general principle in mind which he or she had not thought of before but the situation before him or her falls into it. The New Zealand legislation includes the provision that in any other instance where a person is profiting from his or her homicide, the court shall make the appropriate order. This provision could be included in this Bill to sweep up anything that is missed but that could be dangerous because a judge might do something that was unwarranted and then there would be a lot of litigation to get it reversed. The Bill, if properly drafted, could work but my concern is that it would be rushed through without being properly drafted. We do not want to end up thinking that we have solved the problem only to find that once implemented, misery was caused.