Opinion ID: 2743618
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Insanity Defense Under Arizona Law

Text: Arizona’s traditional approach to the insanity defense was adapted from M’Naghten’s Case, (1843) 8 Eng. Rep. 718 (Q.B.), the single most influential articulation of the common law insanity defense.3 In that case, in 1843, Daniel 3 See Renée Melançon, Note, Arizona’s Insane Response to Insanity, 40 Ariz. L. Rev. 287, 294 (1998) [hereinafter Response to Insanity] (“Arizona’s original insanity defense statute was basically the M’Naghten test.”); see also Durham v. United States, 214 F.2d 862, 869 (D.C. Cir. 1954), abrogated on other grounds by United States v. Brawner, 471 F.2d 969 (D.C. Cir. 1972) (“[T]he House of Lords in the famous M’Naghten case restated what had become the accepted ‘right-wrong’ test in a form which has since been followed, not only in England but in most American jurisdictions as an exclusive test of criminal responsibility.”) (footnotes omitted); Wayne R. LaFave, 1 Subst. Crim. L. § 7.2 (2d ed.) (“In a majority of the jurisdictions in this country, what is most often referred to 8 CLARK V. ARNOLD M’Naghten shot and killed Edward Drummond, the secretary to Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, believing that Drummond was Peel. See id. at 719; Fradella, From Insanity, at 15. M’Naghten was under the delusion that Peel was persecuting him, and he was acquitted of murder on the ground of insanity. Subsequently, the House of Lords put several questions relating to insanity to English judges. See M’Naghten, 8 Eng. Rep. at 720. The judges’ answers became known as the M’Naghten Rules, the most important of which provided: [T]o establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at 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 he was doing what was wrong. Id. at 722. as the M’Naghten rule has long been accepted as the test to be applied for the defense of insanity.”); Henry F. Fradella, From Insanity to Beyond Diminished Capacity: Mental Illness and Criminal Excuse in the Post-Clark Era, 18 U. Fla. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 7, 15 (2007) [hereinafter From Insanity] (“In 1843, the M’Naghten case set forth a legal standard for insanity that many U.S. jurisdictions still use today.”) (footnotes omitted); cf. Clark, 548 U.S. at 749 (“Even a cursory examination of the traditional Anglo-American approaches to insanity reveals significant differences among them, with four traditional strains variously combined to yield a diversity of American standards[,]” although the first two strains “emanate from the alternatives stated in the M’Naghten rule.”). CLARK V. ARNOLD 9 M’Naghten essentially established a two pronged insanity defense. The first, the cognitive incapacity prong, asks whether a mental defect left a defendant at the time of the act unable to understand what he was doing—to form the requisite mens rea of the crime charged. See Clark, 548 U.S. at 747; Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (“The cognitive incapacity part of the test relieves the defendant of liability when the defendant is incapable of forming mens rea.”). If, for example, “in crushing the skull of a human being with an iron bar, [a person] believed that he was smashing a glass jar,” he would be deemed insane under the cognitive incapacity prong of M’Naghten. 2 Wharton’s Crim. L. § 101 (15th ed.); see also Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (“For example, if a man strangled another person believing that he was squeezing the juice out of a lemon, he did not understand the nature and quality of his act.”). The second prong, called the moral incapacity prong, asks whether a mental disease or defect left the defendant unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his act. See Clark, 548 U.S. at 747. In that circumstance, the defendant “knew what he was doing; he knew that he was crushing the skull of a human being with an iron bar. However, because of mental disease, he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. He believed, for example, that he was carrying out a command from God.” 2 Wharton’s Crim. L. § 101. In that example, the defendant would have satisfied the cognitive capacity prong—because he had the mens rea for he knew he was crushing a human skull with intent to kill—but he could be adjudged insane because he did not think his doing so was wrong given the context. See Fradella, From Insanity, at 18 (describing this prong of M’Naghten as “usually at the crux of an insanity defense”). 10 CLARK V. ARNOLD Until the early 1990s, Arizona “uniformly adhered” to “the Rule of M’Naghten’s Case as the test for criminal insanity.” State v. Schantz, 403 P.2d 521, 525 (1965) (citing cases from 1921). When Arizona “first codified an insanity rule [in 1978] it adopted the full M’Naghten statement.” Clark, 548 U.S. at 747. The 1978 law read in relevant part: A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct the person was suffering from such a mental disease or defect as not to know the nature and quality of the act or, if such person did know, that such person did not know that what he was doing was wrong. Id. at 747–48 (quoting Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13–502 (West 1978)). But in 1993, after a defendant in a highly publicized murder trial was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was later released, Arizona’s legislature changed the insanity defense and adopted a much more restrictive version of the test. Melançon, Response to Insanity, at 290. The new law did not include a “cognitive incapacity” provision; it left only the second prong of the M’Naghten test, the so-called moral incapacity test: A person may be found guilty except insane if at the time of the commission of the criminal act the person was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that the person did not know the criminal act was wrong. A mental disease or defect constituting legal insanity is an affirmative CLARK V. ARNOLD 11 defense. Mental disease or defect does not include disorders that result from acute voluntary intoxication or withdrawal from alcohol or drugs, character defects, psychosexual disorders or impulse control disorders. Conditions that do not constitute legal insanity include but are not limited to momentary, temporary conditions arising from the pressure of the circumstances, moral decadence, depravity or passion growing out of anger, jealousy, revenge, hatred or other motives in a person who does not suffer from a mental disease or defect or an abnormality that is manifested only by criminal conduct. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 13-502(A). In State v. Mott, 931 P.2d 1046 (Ariz. 1997), the Arizona Supreme Court addressed what kind of evidence could be admitted at trial to negate specific intent under the new law. Mott concerned expert evidence on battered woman syndrome (“BWS”). 931 P.2d at 1049. The defendant was convicted of two counts of child abuse and first-degree murder and sought to introduce testimony from an expert on BWS to show that the defendant’s mental capacity negated the specific intent necessary to “knowingly or intentionally” commit child abuse. Id. The trial court denied the admission of such evidence, but the appellate court reversed. The Arizona Supreme Court reversed again. Id. Reviewing the Arizona insanity defense statute, the court concluded that the legislature’s rejection of a diminished capacity defense (the cognitive prong) was also a bar on “evidence of a defendant’s mental disorder short of insanity either as an affirmative 12 CLARK V. ARNOLD defense or to negate the mens rea element of a crime.” Id. at 1051. The BWS expert’s “testimony was offered to demonstrate that defendant’s mental incapacity negated specific intent.” Id. at 1054. The court held it was not admissible for that purpose, and “did not meet the standards of the one test for criminal responsibility—the M’Naghten test—that Arizona does follow”—the moral incapacity prong of the test. Id. at 1054–55. “Furthermore, if [the court] adopted the defendant’s position and allowed expert testimony such as this to negate specific intent, the result would be . . . to compel juries to ‘release[ ] upon society many dangerous criminals who obviously should be placed under confinement.’” Id. at 1055 (alteration in original) (citation omitted).4