Opinion ID: 2607866
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Model Penal Code

Text: The drafters of the Model Penal Code were aware of the anomaly and pointed out that harsh and unjust results were obtained from applying the objective test for provocation. They cited State v. Gounagias, 88 Wash. 304, 153 P. 9 (1915), as a model of an unjust result achieved through application of the objective test for provocation. [14] That case may serve as an illustration of the test for provocation and also, by negative implication, of the object of modifying that defense. While lying in a drunken stupor, Gounagias, a member of the Greek community, was sodomized by another member of that community. Outraged and greatly embarrassed, he upbraided his assailant the next morning and asked him not to spread any stories among other members of the community about what had happened. The assailant, however, proved unsympathetic. From taunts, conversational innuendos and jeering signs, Gounagias realized that the story had been spread far and wide. His anger and isolation from the rest of his community increased at every embarrassing innuendo. Some weeks after the original incident, Gounagias went to a coffee house where an incident occurred which, in the words of the court, excited and enraged him. He went home, retrieved a pistol hidden under his mattress, and went to the home of his assailant. By the light of a match, Gounagias found him asleep in his bed and shot him five times in the head. Charged with murder, Gounagias asked for mitigation based on the common law defense of provocation. The Supreme Court of Washington set out the standard for that defense as follows:    if the act of killing, though intentional, be committed under the influence of sudden intense anger or heat of blood obscuring the reason, produced by an adequate or reasonable provocation, and before sufficient time has elapsed for the blood to cool and reason to reassert itself, so that the killing is the result of temporary excitement rather than of wickedness of heart or innate recklessness of disposition, then the law, recognizing the standard of human conduct as that of the ordinary or average man, regards the offense so committed as of less heinous character than premeditated or deliberate murder. Measured, as it must be, by the conduct of the average man, what constitutes adequate cause is incapable of exact definition. 88 Wash. at 311-312, 153 P. 9. In explanation of the doctrine, the court added: We apprehend that the true rule is precisely the same as that in other cases where reasonableness of human conduct is necessarily measured by the conduct of the ordinary or average man in like situation, so frequently announced and applied in cases where the ultimate question is one of negligence. 88 Wash. at 315, 153 P. 9. With this understanding of provocation, the Washington court reached the conclusion that Gounagias waited too long after the original incident for provocation to be a reasonable explanation of his behavior. In the words of the court: To say that these repeated demonstrations, coupled with the original outrage, culminated in a sudden passion and heat of blood when he encountered the same character of demonstration in the coffee house on the night of the killing is to say that sudden passion and heat of blood, in the mitigative sense, may be a cumulative result of repeated reminders of a single act of provocation occurring weeks before, and this, whether that provocation be regarded as the original outrage or the spreading of the story among appellant's associates, both of which he knew and fully realized for three weeks before the fatal night. This theory of the cumulative effect of reminders of former wrongs, not of new acts of provocation by the deceased, is contrary to the idea of sudden anger as understood in the doctrine of mitigation. In the nature of the thing, sudden anger cannot be cumulative. A provocation which does not cause instant resentment, but which is only resented after being thought upon and brooded over, is not a provocation sufficient in law to reduce intentional killing from murder to manslaughter    88 Wash. at 318, 153 P. 9. The drafters of the Model Penal Code found it shocking to disregard that the passage of time served only to increase rather than diminish Gounagias' outrage as the story became known. Model Penal Code Tentative draft No. 9 § 201.3 at 48. They said: Though it is difficult to state a middle ground between a standard which ignores all individual peculiarities and one which makes emotional distress decisive regardless of the nature of its cause, we think that such a statement is essential. For surely if the actor had just suffered a traumatic injury, if he were blind or were distraught with grief, if he were experiencing an unanticipated reaction to a therapeutic drug, it would be deemed atrocious to appraise his crime for purposes of sentence without reference to any of these matters. They are material because they bear upon the inference as to the actor's character that it is fair to draw upon the basis of his act. So too in such a situation as Gounagias, supra, where lapse of time increased rather than diminished the extent of the outrage perpetrated on the actor, as he became aware that his disgrace was known, it was shocking in our view to hold this vital fact to be irrelevant.