COMMONWEALTH оf Pennsylvania v. Stephen WEINSTEIN, Appellant
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania
October 26, 1982
451 A.2d 1344
Submitted Jan. 18, 1982.
Having determined that the court below erroneously held the statute of limitations barring appellee‘s claim for support to be unconstitutional, we reverse.
Order reversed.
Robert B. Lawler, Chief, Appeals Div., Mark Gurеvitz, Philadelphia, for appellee.
Before O‘BRIEN, C.J., and ROBERTS, NIX, LARSEN, FLAHERTY and HUTCHINSON, JJ.
OPINION OF THE COURT
HUTCHINSON, Justice.
In May of 1968 appellant, Stephen Z. Weinstein, while represented by two attorneys, entered a plea of guilty to an indictment charging him with the murder of John W. Green, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, recently arrived from his home in the midwest. Appellant was sentenced by a three judge court to life imprisonment for first degree murder.1 On direct appeal in 1971, appellant
The facts in this case were summarized in Justice Bell‘s opinion supporting affirmance on direct appeal in 1971.3
Appellant first met his victim, Green, on October 16, 1967 when Green came into his Walnut Street store to purchase a pipe. Attracted to Green by his tight-fitting levis,
Before the Sunday meeting, appellant emptied into a small jar the contents of some ten sleeping capsules, intending to use them on Green. When Green came to appellant‘s Walnut Street shop on Sunday, appellant offered to get him a hamburger, and the unsuspecting Green accepted appellant‘s hospitality. Appellant sprinkled the powder on the hamburger and gave it to Green. Appellant and Green then took a taxicab to appellant‘s Philadelphia 1700 Complex shop. By the time they reached the shop, Green complained of drowsiness, and within an hour he fell to the floor unconscious. Shortly thereafter, appellant and a young friend, James Hammell, to whom appellant had previously telephoned, attempted to revive Green, but to no avail. According to appellant‘s confession, after Hammell left his shop, he was suddenly filled with a strange sexual urge.
Appellаnt then strangled Green, first with a piece of rope and then with his bare hands, and this killed him. Shortly afterward, appellant, with the assistance of Hammell and some other boys, attempted to dispose of Green‘s body. Unable to bury the body in a wooded area near Reading, Pennsylvania, appellant and Hammell eventually placed the body in a trunk, filled it with stones, and dumped it into the Delaware River near the Philadelphia 1700 Complex. Appellant subsequently fled to New York City where he was eventually apprehended by the New York police.
Commonwealth v. Weinstein, 442 Pa. 70, 75-76, 274 A.2d 182, 186-87 (1971) (footnotes omitted) (emphasis in original).
Appellant relies on Commonwealth v. Walzack, 468 Pa. 210, 360 A.2d 914 (1976), sustaining, on grounds of relevance, the admissibility of psychiatric testimony to the effect that a
Appellant‘s reliance on Commonwealth v. Walzack, 468 Pa. 210, 360 A.2d 914 (1976), suggests an over-hasty reading resulting in a failure to see the line so carefully drawn by Justice Nix. While announcing that this Court would, in the future, accept psychiatric testimony on a defendant‘s diminished capacity to think and, therefore, to form the intent to kill requisite to a finding of first degree murder, the Court expressly rejected irresistible impulse testimony.
The doctrines of diminished capacity and irresistible impulse involve entirely distinct considerations. Irresistible impulse is a test for insanity which is broader than the M‘Naghten test. Under the irresistible impulse test a person may avoid criminal responsibility even though he is
Commonwealth v. Walzack, Id., 468 Pa. at 220-221, 360 A.2d at 919, 920, (emphasis in original).
Walzack does not recognize irresistible impulse as a test on either diminished capacity or specific intent. In fact, this Court specifically rejected irresistible impulse as a test for diminished capacity in Commonwealth v. Carroll, 412 Pa. 525, 194 A.2d 911 (1963). No irresistible impulse testimony was offered in Walzack and, properly read, the case held only that psychiatric testimony which speaks to the legislatively defined state of mind encompassing a specific intent to kill is admissible. Walzack does not say that all psychiatric testimony, regardless of its nature, is relevant to the question of specific intent. Rather it merely recognizes that cоmpetent psychiatric testimony which speaks to a defendant‘s ability to plan, deliberate and premeditate is relevant.
Prior to Walzack this Court, in Commonwealth v. McCusker, 448 Pa. 382, 292 A.2d 286 (1972) held for the first time that psychiatric testimony was competent and relevant to show that a defendant‘s subjective state of mind was such that he acted in a state of passion which reduced a homicide to manslaughter under the statutory definition then in effect. In so holding this Court criticized our earlier line of cases holding that psychiatric opinion was so fraught with scientific uncertainty that the expert testimony of its practitioners was incompetent on the issue of specific intent. Examining Walzack, in the light of McCusker, it appears this Court has rejected the notion that the unreliability of psychiatric testimony is so great that expert psychiatric opinion adds nothing to the lay knowledge of the fact finder.
A theory holding expert testimony of medically defined general psychoses, which impair an individual‘s ability to control his conduct, relevant to the negation of specific intent was prospectively adopted by the D.C. Circuit in United States v. Brawner, 471 F.2d 969 (D.C.Cir.1972).4 It was subsequently rejected in Bethea v. United States, 365 A.2d 64 (D.C.App.1976), as resting on a flawed analogy. Brawner held that if evidence of reduced criminal responsibility is relevant in cases involving intoxication, similar evidence must be relevant in cases involving mental illness. Following Brawner by four years, the Bethea Court rejected the asserted analogy in Brawner, noting the significant evidentiary distinctions between psychiatric abnormality and recognized incapacitating circumstances such as intoxication and epilepsy. See 3 West. New Eng. L. Rev. 583, 598 (1981). The latter conditions differ significantly from a psychosis which causes an irresistible impulse to kill. The rejected Brawner test for relevancy to specific intent, like the ALI test for the defense of insanity, relates to an illness which so distorts or confuses an individual‘s mental processes that he is unable to control his actions and thus is robbed of his freedom to adhere to the right and eschew the wrong. The M‘Naghten test, which remains the law of Pennsylvania, deals on the other hand with knowledge of right from wrong and appreciation of the nature and quality of the act.
In some jurisdictions, appellant‘s offer of psychiatric testimony on his irresistible impulse would have been admissible to prove that he was not sane at the time of the offense. See Durham v. United States, 94 U.S.App.D.C. 228, 214 F.2d 862 (1954). That, however, is not the law in Pennsylvania. Commonwealth v. Walzack, 468 Pa. at 214, 360 A.2d at 916 makes this point abundantly clear:
[T]oday‘s decision in no way affects the vitality of the M‘Naghten test as the sole standard in this Commonwealth for determining criminal responsibility where the actor alleges mental illness or defect. Second, ..., we do not view the position adopted today as inferentially accepting the irresistible impulse test which we have previously expressly rejected.
The law of the United States, and indeed of аll English speaking jurisdictions, premises criminal responsibility on an act coupled with moral culpability. See Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 72 S.Ct. 240, 96 L.Ed. 288 (1952); Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S.Ct. 857, 95 L.Ed. 1137 (1950). See also Commonwealth v. Weiss, 139 Pa. 247, 21 A. 10 (1891). It requires a mens rea, an intent of varying types, depending on the particular crime. This requirement of moral culpability presupposes a freedom to turn from the wrong and to seek the right, an innate human ability to act in a rational manner. The concept of irresistible impulse, on the other hand, is grounded in determinism. It denies choice. For this reason, it is an alternate test of sanity in those jurisdictions, not including Pеnnsylvania, which accept it. If one accepts the proposition that a particular human being has no control over his actions even though he knows them to be wrong, then one cannot hold him criminally responsible for those acts and still retain the concept that every wrongful act must be coupled with intent if it is to carry a criminal sanction. Thus, irresistible impulse does not diminish intent. It swallows it up.
As a matter of syllogistic logic one might consider irresistible impulse as valid a talisman for the determination of criminаl intent as the ability to distinguish right from wrong. The refusal of jurisdictions such as Pennsylvania to accept it is based not on such logic, but on policy. Within the determinist assumptions of a large and influential school of psychiatry, the negation of intent is an entirely logical corollary. The assumptions of the law—rationality, free will
The law, in its effort to shape a rational social policy, grounded in the broadly shared assumptions of the individuals who make up society, cannot admit that acts an individual carefully plans and carries out to advance his own desire, when he knows those acts will result in the death of another human being, will not be punished simply because of the intensity or strangeness of that desire. Such an admission proceeds imperceptibly to the absurd result that the more strange and brutal the act the more likely the actor is to be relieved of its criminal consequences. Along the psychoanalytic continuum the outrageous proves the innocence. In an oddly circular fashion the act establishes its cause as mental illness and the mental illness determines the act. Such analysis may be medically useful.5 It is not legally useful. As etiology is not congruent with proximate cause, mental illness is not congruent with insаnity. Although we do not exclude expert medical testimony on causation because its definitions differ from ours, we do require that medical testimony speak to us in our language and we accept it only where the two concepts overlap. The same should be true of psychiatric testimony on mental illness as it relates to the various distinct issues on which sanity is legally relevant.
Inability to speak in terms of the legal concept of specific intent, but only in the determinist language of irresistible impulse is instructive in analyzing the general reluctance of many courts to admit such testimony or to recognize the validity and relevance of the irresistible im-
Thus, in this case, defendant‘s expert was unable to speak to the issue of specific intent, recognizable by the law, and was unable logically to relate defendant‘s underlying disease or mental defect to his uncontrollable act. Defendant was clearly able to formulate and carry out a plan or design. He carefully arranged the victim‘s presence at his
Accordingly, we hold psychiatric testimony to the effect that a defendant had a compulsion or irresistible impulse to kill irrelevant and, therefore, inadmissible on the issue of the defendant‘s specific intent to kill, within the statutory definition of first degree murder, in the presence of evidence that the killing was planned, premeditated and deliberate.
Affirmed.
McDERMOTT, J., took no part in the consideration of the merits of this case, however, hе files a memorandum opinion.
LARSEN, J., files a concurring opinion.
LARSEN, Justice, concurring.
I join in the result reached by the majority opinion. However, I would limit all psychiatric evidence to a determination of sanity or insanity as set forth in the M‘Naghten Rule. If an individual was insane per the M‘Naghten Rule, then, obviously, that individual could have formed no specific intent to commit the crime in question.
MEMORANDUM *
McDERMOTT, Justice.
The majority assures us that M‘Naghten is alive in Pennsylvania. Who he is and when he comes to town is, from this decision and its predecessors, not really knowable.
While the majority opinion dutifully affirms the M‘Naghten Rule, it only obliquely defines it. The rule as stated most recently by Mr. Justice Roberts in Commonwealth v. Roberts, 496 Pa. 428, 437 A.2d 948 (1981) is the classic definition. Once stated, it is glaringly clear that Commonwealth v. Walzack, 468 Pa. 210, 360 A.2d 914 (1976), Commonwealth v. McCusker, 448 Pa. 382, 292 A.2d 286 (1972), and the present opinion are flirtations on the psychiatric rialto, where one can hire a psyche for any occasion.
The M‘Naghten Rule, affirmed now and of unbroken precedent, is as Mr. Justice Roberts said:
[A]t the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.
Commonwealth v. Roberts, 496 Pa. at 434, 437 A.2d at 951; Commonwealth v. Woodhouse, 401 Pa. 242, 249-50, 164 A.2d 98, 103 (1960), quoting Queen v. M‘Naghten, 10 Cl. & Fin. 200, 8 Eng.Rep. 718 (1843). Mr. Justice Hutchinson is obliged to studiously distinguish the present case, not from M‘Naghten, but from Walzack and McCusker.
In Walzack, McCusker, and now in Weinstein II, this Court allowed “psychiatric evidence” on whether there was specific intent in the commission of an offense. Walzack, 468 Pa. at 212, 360 A.2d at 915 (1976); McCusker, 448 Pa. at 391, 292 A.2d at 291 (1972). What the “psychiatric evidence” may be is the question put here. That the case answers, perhaps for the fourth time, that “irresistible impulse” is not a relevant cоncept shows the price we must pay for the lure to erudite analysis of evanescent psychiatric theories. See Commonwealth v. Weinstein, 442 Pa. 70, 274 A.2d 182 (1971) (affirmance by an equally divided Court). In prior opinions larded with conflicting psychiatric texts, our grip on the sane, sensible and now reaffirmed M‘Naghten Rule trembles. In view of the decision here, once again allowing
One need not go beyond the case at hand to prove the point. The dilution of M‘Naghten by Walzack and McCusker has seeded this appeal. Appellant Weinstein did his killing in 1968. Here before, he now returns over a decade later, under the auspices of Walzack and McCusker, utilizing the ambiguity of “psychiatric evidence” that is now perpetuated. He will be back at the next slip of the pen.
This case, with its distinctions and justifications, affirms that “psychiatric evidence” is admissible when relevant. It does not say that that evidence must be relevant under the M‘Naghten Rule. In short, it plunges us intо determinations that are and will be experimental at best, leaving the trial courts without guidance and our dockets filled.
The M‘Naghten Rule is clear. It sweeps away as irrelevant all proferred evidence which cannot say that by reason of a disease of the mind the defendant did not and could not know the difference between right and wrong at the time the crime was committed. Hence, “irresistible impulse,” “diminished responsibility” are irrelevant, as is any evidence that is not offered to satisfy the structure of the M‘Nаghten Rule, including the litany recited by Justice Horace Stern in Commonwealth v. Neill, 362 Pa. 507, 67 A.2d 276 (1949):
Certainly neither social maladjustment, nor lack of self-control, nor impulsiveness, nor psycho-neurosis, nor emotional instability, nor chronic malaria, nor all of such conditions combined, constitute insanity within the criminal-law conception of that term.
362 Pa. at 514, 515, 67 A.2d at 280. In short, we should make it clear that only unambiguous psychiatric evidence, offered to prove insanity under the M‘Naghten Rule, is relevant and acceptable.
To allow evidence that cannоt say with certainty that one is insane under the definition of M‘Naghten is to allow anyone to say anything they wish, hardly a rule of relevance. Hence, we should say that evidence of alleged insan-
Notes
Fingarette and Hasse, Mental Disabilities and Criminal Law, 117-33 (1980). With all respect to the utility of psychiatric presumptions in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, the terms “full conscious affirmation” and perception “in some fundamental way” lack meaning in the context of our legal definitions.In broadest terms, the presumption is that a deliberate, premeditated killing is the full conscious affirmation of the act by one who has, in some fundamental way, the ability to perceive its criminal significance ....
For a variety of mental conditions this normal presumption of fact does not hold true .... for example, in certain criminal acts arising out of schizophrenic “flatness of affect” or depressive psychotic states of absolute despair and guilt ....
Such persons may know the verbal formulas, but they do not share the background required to identify and weigh—in practice—the relevant factors, and the possible justification of excuses. So they cannot apply the verbal formulas in a practical way. They—and their deliberations—are in that respect irratiоnal.