Maine’s highest court heard oral arguments on Thursday in a case that could end a long-standing family feud over the estate of Robert R. Young, who owned Young’s Lobster Pound in Belfast.
At issue is a ruling from a lower court that recognized a will written by Young in 2000 instead of a handwritten document that Young wrote the night before his death that drastically changed who would inherit his assets.
Jennifer Eastman, a lawyer for one of Young’s sons and his daughter, argued Thursday that the handwritten document is legitimate and that a Waldo County probate judge should not have considered evidence about the circumstances surrounding his writing of the document when deciding whether or not it was valid.
But several Maine Supreme Judicial Court justices pushed back against that notion, including Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill, who said the issue was determining whether or not Young intended the handwritten document to be his final will.
“Why can’t that be done by extrinsic evidence?” she said.
The document Young wrote before his death was labeled as a will but he did not sign it with his full name and his usual cursive signature. Instead, he printed “Bob Young” in block letters, according to court documents.
Brett Baber, a lawyer for Robert Young’s other son, Raymond, said that suggests that the handwritten document may have been a list of items that Young intended to talk to his lawyer about, not what he intended to be his final will and testament.
Eastman argued that the signature didn’t need to match his earlier signatures to be considered valid under law.
“People are allowed to change their minds,” she said. “This was an informal document…it doesn’t mean that it is invalid.”
Stanfill said the fact that Young did not sign the document in his customary way may have indicated that he didn’t intend to adopt the document as his final will.
But Associate Justice Julia Lipez said she was “troubled” by the idea that someone could write a will that could be overridden after the fact based on conversations the person was having at the time.
Young’s formal will, written in 2000, left the lobster pound and certain real estate to his son Raymond, who has run the lobster pound for more than two decades. It divided the rest of his estate between Raymond and Robert’s daughter, Dianne Parker and left his estranged son Bobby just $1.
The handwritten document he wrote on the eve of his death in 2017 said the lobster pound should be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. His remaining real estate should be distributed to Dianne and the remaining assets divided between Dianne and Bobby, with whom he had recently reconciled.
In August 2025, Waldo County Probate Judge Joanna Owen, ruled in Raymond Young’s favor, allowing the 2000 will into probate.
During oral arguments on Thursday, Brett Baber also argued that the 2017 handwritten document should be rejected because it was rooted in racism. Young had “tremendous racial animus,” Baber said, and was angry at Raymond and Raymond’s daughters, who had married Jamaican men.
A will based on racial animosity cannot be admitted into probate court because it violates public policy against racism, he argued.
Stanfill appeared skeptical of the argument and pointed out that his argument potentially undercut Baber’s assertion that the handwritten document was not valid, since it suggested a motivation for changing the will, which would strengthen the argument that Young intended for the handwritten document to serve as his will.
In 2018, Raymond sued his siblings saying they had convinced their father to write the handwritten document using undue influence, fraud or coercion. But in 2022, a Waldo County Superior Court Judge ruled that he had failed to prove the claims.
The high court will now take the current case under advisement. It was not clear on Thursday when it may make a ruling.
