Court Opinion

ID: 9730076
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:00:25.483358+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:03.957948
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Koberts:
I can only reiterate what I said in Commonwealth v. Ahearn, 421 Pa. 311, 331, 218 A. 2d 561, 571 (1966) : “It is a commonplace that hard cases make bad law, yet it is one that we need remember. There can be no doubt that this Court is now faced with a hard case. Unfortunately, in my opinion, the result reached represents bad law. Despite the brutality of the crime, despite the overwhelming evidence of the existence of the *282elements of murder in the first degree, despite my own evaluation of the psychiatric testimony here in dispute, I must dissent. In my view, the majority unwisely restricts the purpose for which psychiatric evidence may be admitted, and thereby binds the courts of this Commonwealth to a rule which is contrary to enlightened authority.”
In an attempt to demonstrate that appellant lacked the specific intent to kill which is a necessary ingredient of a first degree nonfelony murder conviction, counsel offered several reports by eminent psychiatrists. Consistent with the Ahearn decision, the court below acting as the fact-finder refused to admit this medical testimony on the specific intent issue although it did accept this evidence in mitigation of penalty.
The report of Dr. Robert L. Leopold contained the following characterization of appellant: “From the psychiatric standpoint, there is no question whatsoever in our [Dr. Leopold and Dr. M. Lawrence Spoont] minds that this man is suffering from severe, chronic, progressive schizophrenia. He is impulse-ridden, delusional, hallucinatory, and without insight. We desire to stress that he is a thoroughly dangerous human being who has no control whatsoever over his own aggression and who, because of his paranois [sic], can be expected to kill at any time that he is under what for him is sufficient emotional pressure. . . .
“We are aware that the McNaughton [sic] formulation of criminal insanity includes only the concept of whether a man knows the difference between right and wrong. On an intellectual level, Frank Phelan can make this distinction. It is, however, meaningless to him because such an intellectual concept is overwhelmed totally by his psychotic needs.”
Dr. Kenneth E. Appel, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded: “He can say the words right and wrong, he can tell *283the legal consequences of criminal actions, such as murder, but his pathology or sickness of mind is so strong that he is not free to act under such concepts and considerations — they are irrelevant, purely verbal and impotent before the strength of his destructive almost animalistic drive and almost delight in killing.
“The diagnosis is mental disease — Severe Intense Paranoid Schizophrenia, in my opinion — with delusions of grandeur, persecution and compulsion to kill.” (Emphasis in original.)
Hornbook law tells us that relevant evidence is admissible evidence. Professor McCormick has succinctly stated: “[T]he most acceptable test of relevancy is the question, does the evidence offered render the desired inference more probable than it would be without the evidence? . . . Relevant evidence, then, is evidence that in some degree advances the inquiry, and thus has probative value, and is prima facie admissible.” McCormick, Evidence §152, at 318-19 (1954). (Emphasis in original.) Certainly, the two psychiatric reports quoted above advance the inquiry as to whether Phelan had the requisite specific intent and make it more probable that he did not than it would be without the evidence. The M’Naghten rule, which formed the basis for exclusion of similar evidence in Ahearn, is nowise an evidentiary test; devised to establish a standard of the degree of mental impairment necessary to render a defendant not criminally responsible, it should not be employed to restrict the scope of relevant evidence on an entirely distinct issue, i.e., specific intent to kill.
The Ahearn decision was, in fact, a departure from prior Pennsylvania law — a departure I could not sane-1 tion then and cannot now. In several of the cases cited by the Ahearn majority on the admissibility issue, the lower court did permit the psychiatrist to give his expert opinion as to the defendant’s state of mind. *284See Commonwealth v. Carroll, 412 Pa. 525, 194 A. 2d 911 (1963); Commonwealth v. Jordan, 407 Pa. 575, 181 A. 2d 310 (1962); Commonwealth v. Tyrrell, 405 Pa. 210, 174 A. 2d 852 (1961); Commonwealth v. Woodhouse, 401 Pa. 242, 164 A. 2d 98 (1960); Commonwealth v. Neill, 362 Pa. 507, 67 A. 2d 276 (1949). In each of these cases we merely questioned the weight to’ be accorded such evidence and did not rule that the evidence was inadmissible.
The vice of the majority’s position is self-evident. It has been rejected in other M’Naghten jurisdictions1 and by The American Law Institute.2 So long as a specified mental state forms one of the elements of first degree nonfelony murder, this Court should not deprive the' fact-finder of relevant, possibly probative, evidence. To ignore the contribution psychiatry can make to the reliability of verdicts is to retreat from the Twentieth Century.
I am compelled to dissent.

 People v. Henderson, 60 Cal. 2d 482, 386 P. 2d 677, 35 Cal. Rptr. 77 (1963) (Traynor, C. J.); Battalino v. People, 118 Colo. 587, 199 P. 2d 897 (1948); State v. Gramenz, 256 Iowa 134, 126 N.W. 2d 285 (1964); State v. DiPaolo, 34 N.J. 279, 168 A. 2d 401 (1961) (Weintraue, C. J.). Rejection of the majority’s restrictive' view, is not of totally recent origin. See Andersen v. State, 43 Conn. 514 (1876); People v. Moran, 249 N.Y. 179, 163 N.E. 553 (1928); State v. Green, 78 Utah 580, 6 P. 2d 177 (1931); Dejarnette v. Commonwealth, 75 Va. 867, 884 (1881) (dictum).

 A.L.I. Model Penal Code, §4.02(1) (Official Draft, 1962).