Appellant Steven T eater was charged with murder in the first degree and attempted murder in the first degree in connection with the killing of his wife and the shooting of her friend Rod McKinney. Following a jury trial, Teater was convicted of murder in the second degree, a Class B felony, and attempted murder in the second degree, a Class C felony. He received sentences of twenty years and ten years, respectively, in the Arkansas Department of Correction; was fined $25,000; and was ordered to pay court costs in the amount of $150. Teater’s sole point on appeal is that the trial court erred when it refused to instruct the jury on the issue of mental disease or defect. Although the State concedes that the court should have instructed the jury on mental disease or defect, it contends that the omission of the instruction сonstitutes harmless error because Teater was not prejudiced by it. We agree with Teater and reverse.
At trial, McKinney’s neighbor Kenneth Smith testified that sometime after lunch on January 18, 2003, at approximately 1:00 or 2:00 p.m., he heard gunshots coming from McKinney’s residence. Smith statеd that he looked toward McKinney’s house
Smith stated that he saw McKinney running out of the back of the house, and that he again heard gunshots. He said that he thought he heard a woman screaming, “What are you doing?” and that he saw a man go into McKinney’s house. According to Smith, the man came back out of the house, looked down at a woman lying оn the porch, and shot her three times. The man then went back through the house, came out, went down the steps, looked back at the woman’s body, and drove off in his truck. Smith said that McKinney later returned to the house, pulled down his pants, and said, “I been hit too.”
Rusty Bailey, a friend of Stеven Teater and an employee of the Ouachita County Sheriffs Department, said that he received a call from Teater around 2:00 that afternoon. According to Bailey, Teater said that he had shot and killed his wife Becky because he found out that she was hаving an affair. Bailey testified that Teater also said that he had shot at McKinney and that his gun jammed. Bailey also believed that he heard Teater say, “If I would have had the nine I don’t believe it would have jammed,” or something to that effect. While Teater was on the phonе with Bailey, Teater drove up to the Camden Police Department and their conversation ended. Bailey said that during the conversation, Teater did not seem emotionally upset, panicked, or confused, but “was quite clear about what had just happened.”
Bоyd Good, the Camden Police Chief, testified that he encountered T eater in the parking lot of the police station after the shooting. At that point, Teater was attempting to get out of his truck. Good ordered him to the ground, and Teater said, “I did it because she was сheating on me.” According to Good, once Teater was on the ground, he “threw a cell phone and it landed on the pavement.” During this encounter, Good said that Teater “didn’t appear to be excited” and that “there was not any confusion evident in his behavior.”
Becky Teater was later found dead on the front porch of McKinney’s residence. According to George Ingram, the investigating officer, Steven Teater was initially “calm” and “emotionless” during an interview after the shootings, but he became “emotionally distressed” and bеgan to cry uncontrollably as the interview progressed.
Dr. Bradley Diner, a Little Rock psychiatrist, testified as an expert witness on Teater’s behalf. Dr. Diner testified that he evaluated Teater in August of 2003. He said that Teater did not have “any active, current psychiatric disorder” and that Teater was able to appreciate the wrongfulness of the acts in question. However, Dr. Diner also stated as follows:
Because of the way [Teater] handles emotional feelings and stress I think that he was overwhelmed and when he saw Becky and Mr. McKinney together I think that was too much for him and I think this erupted in the aggressive act. That inability to conform can be a very limited period of time.
He also testified that he believed Teater experienced a “dissociative episode” where he blocked out the shoоting incident from his memory, although Teater was aware of what he was doing both before and after the shootings.
Teater testified in his own defense, stating that his wife Becky had engaged in numerous affairs over the course of their marriage and that he was “upset” and “started slapping her” when he suspected she was having an affair with Rod McKinney. He also said that he went over to
The State then produced rebuttal witness Dr. William C. Peel, a psychologist from El Dorado, Arkansas. Dr. Peel testified that, during his evaluation of Teater, Teater admitted to assaulting his wife prior to the shooting incidеnt at McKinney’s home. According to Dr. Peel, Teater also remembered hearing gunshots, being in his truck and driving away, and making phone calls after the shootings. Dr. Peel also stated that Teater remembered arriving at the police station and being arrested and questioned. Dr. Pеel said that, based on his evaluation, Teater “had the capacity for purposeful and knowing conduct” at the time of the shootings. Dr. Peel specifically concluded that “Mr. Teater was capable of knowing right from wrong and of conforming his behavior to the rulеs of law, should he have chosen to do so.”
After testimony ended, Teater requested that the court instruct the jury on the affirmative defense of mental disease or defect. He also requested jury instructions on the lesser-included offenses of second-degree murder, аttempted second-degree murder, manslaughter, and attempted manslaughter. The trial judge refused to give the instruction on mental disease or defect based on his finding that there was no evidence to support the instruction. The trial court did, however, instruct the jury on the lesser-included offenses of second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, manslaughter, and attempted manslaughter.
A party is generally entitled to an instruction on a defense if there is sufficient evidence to raise a question of fact or if there is any suрporting evidence for the instruction. Davis v. State,
Where there is conflicting testimony on the question of a defendant’s sanity at the time of the offense, the issue is a fact question for the jury to decide. Haynes v. State,
In this case, there was testimony from two expert witnesses, Dr. Bradley Diner and Dr. William C. Peel. Dr. Diner opined that, although he could not diagnose Teater with a specific mental disease or defect, Teater had a defect in his personality structure and ability to handle stress that limited his ability to conform his conduct to the requirements of thе law when he killed his wife and shot Rod McKinney. On the other hand, Dr. Peel
In support of its contention that the trial court’s failure to give the mental disease or defect instruction was harmless error, the State asserts that, because the jury convicted Teater of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder, it essentially found that Teater acted “knowingly” in this case. 1 As a result, the State argues that it is implausible to believe that the jury could have accepted Teater’s defense that he did not know what he had done. We do not agree.
Although some constitutional rights are so fundamental that their viоlation can never be deemed harmless error, others are subject to harmless-error analysis. See Chapman v. California,
Certain constitutional errors, however, are so intrinsically harmful that they render a trial fundamentally unfair. See, e.g., Sullivan v. Louisiana,
In [Arizona v. Fulminante,499 U.S. 279 (1991)], we distinguished between, on the one hand, “structural defects in the constitution of the trial mechanism, which defy analysis by ‘harmless-error’ standards,” ... and, on the other hand, trial errors which occur “during the presentation of the case to the jury, and which may therefore be quantitatively assessed in the context of other evidence pre-sentedf.]” ... Denial of the right to a jury verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is certainly an error of the former sort, the jury guarantee being a “basic protectio[n]” whose precise effects are unmeasurable, but without which a criminal trial cannot reliably serve its function The right to trialby jury reflects, we have said, “a profound judgment about the way in which law should be enfоrced and justice administered.” . . . The deprivation of that right, with consequences that are necessarily unquantifiable and indeterminate, unquestionably qualifies as “structural error.”
Sullivan,
To support its harmless-error argument in this case, the State cites Sasser v. State,
On the other hand, Teater argues that the error in omitting the instruction on mental diseasе or defect is a “structural” error that is not subject to harmless-error review. We agree. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution affords a criminal defendant the right to have an impartial jury reach the requisite finding of guilt. See Sullivan v. Louisiana, supra. We cannot apply the harmless-error standard of review in this case because to do so would force this court, inappropriately, to speculate about what the jury would have done had it been properly instructed. See id.
Reversed and remanded.
Notes
In its brief, the State notes that the instructions on second-dеgree murder in this case were based on Ark. Code Ann. § 5-10-103(a)(l) (Repl. 1997), which provides that a person commits second-degree murder if he “knowingly causes the death of another person under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life[.]” The State also points out that the court gave the jury the following definition of “knowingly” contained in Ark. Code Ann. § 5-2-202(2) (Repl. 1997):
A person acts knowingly with respect to his conduct or the attendant circumstances when he is aware that his conduct is of that nature or that such circumstances exist. A person acts knowingly with respect to a result of his conduct when he is aware that it is practically certain that his conduct will cause such a result[.]
(Emphasis added.)