Opinion ID: 307716
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: THE NEED TO ABANDON THE DURHAM-McDONALD TEST

Text: 278 Ever since this court announced its new test of responsibility in 1954, we have been struggling with the problem of distinguishing between the uniquely psychiatric elements of the determination of responsibility, and the legal and moral elements of that determination. We have repeatedly urged psychiatrists to avoid using the conclusory labels of either psychiatry or law. 17 Testimony in terms of the legal conclusion that an act was or was not the product of mental disease invites the jury to abdicate its function and acquiesce in the conclusion of the experts. Testimony in terms of psychiatric labels obscures the fact that a defendant's responsibility does not turn on whether or not the experts have given his condition a name and the status of disease. 18 279 Since Durham we have been engaged in a continuing process of refining and explicating the rule of that case. Carter v. United States defined the term product in broad terms designed to restrict conclusory expert testimony and expand the basic factual information available to the jury. 19 Later McDonald v. United States sought to do the same for the term mental disease or defect 20 by discouraging the use of psychiatric labels which often served to hide the fact that the experts were providing virtually no information about the defendant's underlying condition. 21 The point in both cases was to invite all the information that modern knowledge could provide, to guide the jury's consideration of the moral, legal, and medical elements in the issue of responsibility. But most psychiatrists declined the invitation and continued to decide themselves when an illness should relieve a defendant of responsibility. Therefore in Washington v. United States we reluctantly took the step of prohibiting all psychiatric testimony in terms of the issue of productivity, on the ground that such testimony was particularly likely to usurp the jury's function of resolving the ultimate question of guilt. 22 We said that the existence of disease was a medical question which psychiatrists could properly answer, but the question of productivity was the ultimate question for the jury, involving a mixture of medical information and moral judgment. 280 The reason for the Washington rule was to reserve exclusively for the jury one part of the determination of criminal responsibility. By prohibiting testimony in terms of the ultimate question of productivity we sought to focus on the need for testimony in depth concerning the nature, extent, and manifestations of the defendant's disability. The purpose was to give the jury an adequate basis for deciding whether the disability was such that it would be unjust to condemn the defendant for his conduct. 281 In practice, however, under Durham and its progeny psychiatrists have continued to make moral and legal judgments beyond the proper scope of their professional expertise. 23 Even after Washington, the District Court continues to commit defendants to the public mental hospital for examination under a standard order that asks for a conclusion on productivity. 24 And the doctors who perform most of the examinations have shown little reluctance to answer that an illness was present but the act was not its product. The testimony takes a form that indicates that the psychiatrists are in fact making a moral judgment, that they are finding an illness which in their view is not sufficiently serious or sufficiently related to the act to warrant acquittal. And that, of course, is precisely the judgment that we have entrusted not to the experts but to the jury. 282 Moreover, the productivity requirement tends to focus the attention of expert witnesses and the jury on extraneous and inappropriate issues, and to divert them from the core of the question of responsibility. Durham suggested that the government could establish criminal responsibility either by proving freedom from illness or by proving that the illness did not cause the act. And one way to prove that the illness did not cause the act is to prove that the defendant would have done it anyway. Carter even more explicitly than Durham invited the government to establish responsibility by proving that the defendant would have committed the act even if he had not been ill. Carter stated that productivity amounted to causation of the but for variety: an act is the product of mental disease if the accused would not have committed the act he did commit if he had not been diseased as he was. 25 This approach invited experts and juries to speculate about the defendant's character, and convict him on the ground that he would have been bad if he had not been sick. 26 283 The abuses of the productivity inquiry are strikingly illustrated by the record in this case. Since the expert witnesses agreed that appellant suffered from a substantial disorder, his conviction would seem to depend on the jury's resolution of the question of productivity. The government's two expert witnesses both found mental illness without productivity. The testimony of these two witnesses is open to at least two interpretations. It may be that they regarded appellant's illness as highly specific in its operation: that its only effect on appellant's behavior was to produce an occasional reflex-like explosive reaction following instantly on the heels of the triggering event rather than an hour or two later; that the illness could have no relation to behavior of the type that resulted in appellant's prosecution. Putting aside the conclusory parts of their testimony, the balance of their testimony so understood could support a jury finding of criminal responsibility. 284 But it is not clear whether the conflict among the experts related to the scope of the illness or to its legal significance. In other testimony the government witnesses seem to reject such a tightly compartmentalized view of appellant's mental and emotional processes. 27 There is reason to suspect that their conclusion was based not on a professional judgment about the scope of the illness but rather on the view that the illness was irrelevant because appellant would have committed the crime in any event. Their testimony suggests that they regarded appellant's act as a normal response for someone in his circumstances. 28 285 Clearly, firing a shotgun through a closed door is not a normal response for everyone who is hurt in a fight, though it may well be for some people. The criminal law assumes that there is a spectrum of normality, and that some normal people commit crimes while others do not. We cannot allow either the experts or the jury to speculate about where on that spectrum the defendant would belong if he were not mentally ill. That sort of speculation is especially pernicious because it is likely to discriminate systematically against inner-city slum residents like appellant, since violent unlawful behavior is more common in the slums than in middle class neighborhoods. To regard behavior as the product of illness in the suburbs but normal in the slums is to establish an odious double standard of morality and responsibility. 286 The insanity defense is based on the premise that it is unjust to convict a man for behavior he could not control. There is a high incidence of mental illness in inner-city slum areas, 29 and we are bound to give it the same significance in dealing with their residents as we do in dealing with other people. 30 If appellant's behavior controls were substantially impaired by mental illness, he should not be held responsible on the ground that it is normal for those in his environment to behave that way, 31 or even because the examining psychiatrist believed that under the same circumstances I would want to get even with somebody who broke my jaw. 32 287