Opinion ID: 1942962
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: the expert mental health evidence

Text: It is true that six separate mental health experts testified that Coday's ability to conform to the requirements of law was impaired. But their testimony was based almost totally on Coday's own reporting to them, and ignored the many facts that clearly demonstrated that Coday's actions were deliberately and carefully planned. The experts testified that Coday's capacity to conform to the requirements of law was substantially impaired only from the time he picked up the first hammer until Gloria diedthat is, only for the time it took for him to obtain three different weapons and inflict almost 150 injuries. [32] They testified that Coday was in a dissociative state when he attacked and murdered Gloria, which substantially impaired his ability to conform to the requirements of law during the murder. The experts largely based their opinions about Coday's dissociative state on Coday's self-reports. According to the experts, a person in a dissociative state feels detached from a traumatic experience, as if watching it occur. Several of the expertsDrs. Seligson and Walker, for exampleconcluded that Coday was in this state because when they interviewed him, Coday said he could not remember what happened during the crime and even expressed surprise and cried upon hearing the facts. Dr. Goldstein testified that Coday remembered more details of the crime with him because memories return over time. However, Coday's confessionwritten about three months after the crime and long before he met any of these expertsprovides a detailed account from the moment he felt himself entering a state of shock upon learning that Gloria did not love him the way he thought she did: I hit her with my fist. I went and picked up a hammer lying in my bedroom on top of the yellow pages. I struck her on the head. She fell. I swung again, yelling, screaming, and lost my balance. I landed on top of her. She grabbed the hammer from my hand. I went and picked up another hammer and struck her again. She was bleeding and trying to get up. She screamed and kicked me. I had gotten a knife lying on the kitchen top (I don't remember exactly when) came back and began to stab her. We both were screaming. She scratched me but I stabbed her in the neck then held the knife there. She reached out and held my arm. I heard her mutter some words, but I don't know what she said. Then her hand let loose of mine. I knew she was dead. We have held that a defendant's self-reports, especially those unsupported by the record, serve as a basis for rejecting expert testimony. See Nelson v. State, 850 So.2d 514, 530 (Fla.2003) (affirming the trial court's rejection of uncontroverted expert opinion testimony that the defendant was suffering an extreme mental or emotional disturbance, where the evidence supporting this opinion was largely the defendant's self-report of symptoms to the doctor). Because the experts' conclusions about Coday's dissociative state were based on his self-reports, the trial court was free to reject them. Coday's self-reports were also unreliable because they were self-contradictory. His memory of the crime varied from expert to expert and from interview to interview. At least two doctors gave alternative explanations for his memory loss. Dr. Goldstein testified that Coday's memory loss in the interviews could have resulted from repressing the memory because of the traumatic nature of the incident, not mental illness. And Dr. Seligson testified that Coday's inability to recall what happened was certainly either some kind of memory blocking, or else he was in a dissociative state at the time the incident occurred. (Emphasis added.) Drs. Seligson, Walker, and Jacobson also based their opinions about Coday's dissociative state on his reporting that he felt he was watching himself, and several experts relied on Coday's reports of hearing voices or having hallucinations at the time of both murders. Thus, the experts' opinions that Coday was substantially unable to conform his conduct were based largely on what Coday reported he heard or felt or variously remembered. The experts also contradicted each other about the level of Coday's detachment or dissociation at the time of the murder. Dr. Jacobson testified that during the murder Coday did not see Gloria as a human being but as the personification of a person who was injuring him and this constituted a loss of reality. Dr. Goldstein, however, testified that Coday did not murder Gloria in a totally detached way. He testified that at the time of the murder, Coday specifically knew he was attacking Gloria, knew that he was hitting her with a hammer, knew that his attack was causing injury and pain, and knew that what he was doing could result in Gloria's death. This testimony suggests Coday did not lose touch with reality whatsoever. In addition, when joined with evidence of Coday's control over his actions during the attacks, such evidence contrasts sharply with expert testimony that Coday was unable to control himself during the actual murder. Further, Dr. Goldstein said that Coday was not insane at the time of the murder and admitted that even people who are not mentally ill may allow their emotions to overwhelm their rationality. He conceded that killing out of anger is not mitigation. Finally, the majority finds significant that no lay witnesses testified that Coday had been involved in stressful relationship-based incidents in which he was able to cope. Majority op. at 1005. Although the lay witnesses did not testify to such incidents, one expert did. Dr. Walker testified as follows: [Coday] does not have memory, at least he didn't when I evaluated him[,] of the actual homicide itself. He remembers the voices and the same voices of the girls laughing at him and humiliating him, and feeling the same way that he had felt at other times. He describes feeling that way at several other times when other women that he had a relationship with, had rejected him, and he felt rejected, but was able to contain himself, and exactly why he could contain himself at other times, and not at this time, I think was in the relationship, and in the actual dynamics of the relationship, rather than in his mental illness and an ability to deal with the dynamics of that relationship. Thus, not only did Coday cope with breakups in other romantic relationships despite feeling rejected, hearing voices, and experiencing the humiliation he felt with Gloria, but Dr. Walker explained that Coday's inability to cope this time did not stem from Coday's mental illness. Dr. Walker's conclusion that the on-again, off-again nature of Coday's relationship with Gloria was like that which he had with Lisa Hullinger also is based on Coday's reports. [33] In his concurring opinion, Justice Bell apparently rejects Coday's admission that he maintained control in similar scenes of romantic rejection by women in which he experienced the same feelings. Concurring op. at 43. Relying on Dr. Walker's explanation that the on-again, off-again nature of Coday and Gloria's relationship resulted in Coday's violent reaction, Justice Bell asserts that the record reflects only three incidents of romantic rejection and each was followed by a psychotic episode. This conclusion is based on testimony by several of the experts likening Coday's attempted suicide in jail after receiving divorce papers to his two prior violent responses to rejection and abandonment in a romantic relationship. However, the nature of Coday's relationship with his estranged wife was not like his relationships with the former girlfriends he killed. Coday separated from his estranged wife before he met Gloria. Long before he attempted suicide, he and his estranged wife, no longer romantically involved, had become friends. In fact, though still married to her, Coday sought her advice when Gloria broke up with him. Further, according to Dr. Walker, when Coday received the divorce papers, he thought he already had divorced his estranged wife. There was no on-again, off-again relationship and no romancethe purported determinative factors necessary to spark a violent reaction. Dr. Walker's opinion can therefore be rejected not only because it is based on Coday's reports of the nature of the relationships but also because the suicide attempt disproves her conclusion. As I noted above, a trial court is free to reject even uncontradicted expert testimony where it is difficult to square with the other evidence in the case. Morton, 789 So.2d at 330. The majority cites only one case in which we have reversed a trial court's rejection of uncontroverted expert testimony. Majority op. at 1002; see Crook v. State, 813 So.2d 68 (Fla.2002). The evidence in that case, however, was far stronger, and far more independently verifiable, than the evidence presented here. In Crook, the medical experts performed a series of tests, conducted clinical evaluations, and reviewed Crook's school and medical records. For example, a neurologist determined after testing that damage to Crook's frontal lobe impaired his brain function, resulting in part in an impulse control disorder. Id. at 71-72. Thus, not only did experts testify about the defendant's frontal lobe brain damage; their testimony was based on evidence other than the defendant's self-reporting, including evidence of the causes of the brain damage and objective testing. In contrast, in this case the experts' conclusions on the presence of the impaired capacity mitigator were based on what Coday told them.