Court Opinion

ID: 9749235
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-27 16:28:55.515878+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:25:45.458244
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mb. Justice Roberts :
In sub silentio fashion the majority seeks to chain this Court to the distant past with respect to the admissibility of psychiatric evidence. As quoted in Commonwealth v. Rightnour, 435 Pa. 104, 253 A. 2d 644 (1969) : “ Jf a doctor were to bleed his patients with leeches today, or if a psychiatrist were to attribute insanity to the moon, the hue and cry would be tremendous. And yet instance after instance may be pointed out wherein the law has remained, sometimes for hundreds of years, curiously rigid, despite the changes in scientific opinion upon which the law was based. Many rules in the criminal law are still affect*255ed by early views concerning psychology, which views are now outmoded or repudiated by newer discoveries through experimentation. A large number fail utterly to take cognizance of advances in education and educational methods.’ Woodbridge, Some Unusual Aspects of Mental Irresponsibility in the Criminal Law, 29 J. Crim. Law & Criminology 822 (1938-39), quoted in Taylor, Partial Insanity as Affecting the Degree of Crime—A Commentary on Fisher v. United States, 34 Calif. L. Rev. 625 (1946).” Id. at 120, 253 A. 2d at 652 (dissenting opinion).
The defendant contends that the trial court erred in excluding psychiatric evidence offered to prove that he was incapable of acting with deliberateness and premeditation required for guilt of murder in the first degree.1 The majority cursorily dismisses this contention as being inconsistent with the “well-established law in this Commonwealth.” Quite the contrary our Court has twice in recent years been evenly divided on the issue of whether such psychiatric evidence is admissible. See Commonwealth v. Weinstein, 442 Pa. 70, 274 A. 2d 182 (1971) ; Commonwealth v. Rightnour, supra. Several members of this Court have maintained that such evidence should be admissible. See Commonwealth v. Weinstein, supra at 89, 274 A. 2d at 182 (opinion *256in support of reversal of judgment by Roberts, J., in which Jones and Pomeroy, JJ., joined); Commonwealth v. Rightnour, supra at 120, 253 A. 2d at 652 (dissenting opinion by Roberts, J., in which Jones, J., joined); Commonwealth v. Phelan, 427 Pa. 265, 281, 234 A. 2d 540, 550 (1967) (dissenting opinion by Roberts, J.); Commonwealth v. Ahearn, 421 Pa. 311, 331, 218 A. 2d 561, 571 (1966) (dissenting opinion by Roberts, J., in which Jones, J., joined). My views have not waivered and accordingly I feel compelled to dissent.
It should be noted that the last time our Court confronted this issue in Commonwealth v. Weinstein, supra, only one member of the Court explicitly affirmed the retention of the present rule. Two members of the Court concurred in the result, while three members of the Court urged that in light of progress made in the field of psychiatry we reject our archaic rule.
In ignoring the scientific advances that have been made in the field of psychiatry in the last few decades this Court finds itself opposed by almost all of the significant authorities.2 The 4-3 opinion in Ahearn, supra, which held that psychiatric testimony was inadmissible in determining the degree of guilt, is supported *257by only a dwindling minority of jurisdictions. In recent years several additional jurisdictions wbicb at one time followed a rule similar to Ahearn have unanimously repudiated their old view and have embraced the modern and prevailing concept of diminished responsibility.3 See, e.g., State v. DiPaolo, 34 N.J. 279, 168 A. 2d 401 (1961), followed in State v. Sikora, 44 N.J. 453, 210 A. 2d 193 (1965); People v. Wells, 33 Cal. 2d 330, 202 P. 2d 53 (1949) (dissents on other grounds), followed in People v. Henderson, 35 Cal. Rptr. 77, 386 P. 2d 677 (1963) and People v. Gorshen, 51 Cal. 2d 716, 336 P. 2d 492 (1959) ; Battalino v. People, 118 Colo. 587, 199 P. 2d 897 (1948); State v. Gramenz, 256 Iowa 134, 126 N.W. 2d 285 (1964). England, whose judicial system created the M’Naghten Rule, has now by Act of Parliament recognized the concept of partial responsibility. English Homicide Act, 1957, 5 & 6 Eliz. II, c.ll, §2(1); see Regina v. Dunbar, 41 Cr. App. R. 182 (1957).
The highly praised and influential Model Penal Code explicitly adopts the principle of diminished responsibility: “Evidence that the defendant suffered from a mental disease or defect is admissible whenever it is relevant to prove that the defendant did or did not have a state of mind which is an element of the offense.” A.L.I. Model Penal Code §4.02 (1) (proposed official draft 1962). The mere recitation of a dramatic shift of authority may not, by itself, be sufficient reason for this Court to relinquish its former *258position. Such an inexorable trend should, however, be the catalyst for at least close scrutiny and careful review of the merits of the Ahearn rule and the jurisprudential propriety of its continuance.
The anomalies inherent in maintaining the Ahearn rule bear articulation once more. The Legislature has created a distinction between first and second degree murder based on a determination of whether the defendant committed the slaying with premeditation. When a defendant pleads guilty to murder generally, as the defendant did in this case, the offense charged in the indictment is presumed to be murder in the second degree. Commonwealth v. Barnosky, 436 Pa. 59, 63, 258 A. 2d 512, 514 (1969) ; Commonwealth ex rel. Kerekes v. Maroney, 423 Pa. 337, 340, 223 A. 2d 699, 701 (1966). To raise the offense to first degree murder the Commonwealth has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the slaying was “willful, deliberate and premeditated. ...”
The Ahearn rule compels the trial court to prohibit a defendant from introducing evidence which would be relevant in deciding whether he possessed sufficient mental capacity to have the requisite state of mind for first degree murder. That such evidence is relevant and probative is beyond cavil. A leading commentator has offered the following test for relevancy: “. . . does the evidence offered render the desired inference more probable than it would be without the evidence? . . . Belevant 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) ; 1 Wigmore, Evidence §§9-10, at 289-95 (3d ed. 1940). Surely expert psychiatric evidence on the defendant’s state of mind at the time of the commission of the crime meets this classic definition of relevancy.
*259Our Court has long recognized that excessive indulgence of alcohol might so impair a defendant’s mind as to negate the possibility of deliberation and premeditation: “Intoxication sufficient to deprive the mind of power to form a design with deliberation and premeditation, and to properly judge the legitimate consequences of such an act, will reduce a hilling from murder in the first degree to murder in the second degree.” Commonwealth v. Ingram, 440 Pa. 239, 270 A. 2d 190 (1970) ; Commonwealth v. Brown, 436 Pa. 423, 260 A. 2d 742 (1970) ; Commonwealth v. Walters, 431 Pa. 74, 244 A. 2d 757 (1968) ; Commonwealth v. McCausland, 348 Pa. 275, 35 A. 2d 70 (1944) ; Commonwealth v. Kline, 341 Pa. 238, 19 A. 2d 59 (1941) ; cf. Commonwealth v. Tarver, 446 Pa. 233, 284 A. 2d 759 (1971). The inconsistency between the majority’s exclusion of psychiatric evidence that would illustrate the defendant’s state of mind and this Court’s acceptance of evidence showing that defendant’s mind was impaired by the usage of alcohol or drugs is apparent. As two leading commentators have reasoned: “That a person who hills another without deliberation and premeditation cannot be held liable for first degree murder would seem self-evident under the usual statute defining the crime in terms of those mental elements ; and this would seem to be true whether the lach of deliberation and premeditation was attributable to provohing circumstances, intoxication, mental disorder or any other cause.”4 It should also be remembered that whereas mental disability caused by excessive drug or alcohol use is self-inflicted, mental illness is a malady whose origins are exogeneous to any volitional conduct of the defendant.
Psychiatric evidence is fully admissible at the sentencing stage of the proceeding. In allowing such evi*260dence this Court has given approval to the concept of diminished responsibility: “. . . mitigating circumstances may be considered by the jury in fixing the penalty. ‘Diminished responsibility is a scientific fact, scientifically established and capable of being analyzed.’ ” Commonwealth v. Stabinsky, 313 Pa. 231, 238, 169 Atl. 439, 442 (1933). Why such evidence is considered useful and acceptable at the stage of sentencing but is not admissible during the earlier determination of whether the defendant had the requisite mental intention prescribed by the statute has never been explained by the adherents to the Ahearn rule.
Whatever validity might once have attached to the old “curiously rigid” objections to the admission of psychiatric evidence to establish diminished mental responsibility they have long since been “outmoded and repudiated by new discoveries through experimentation.” Unfortunately, these early views “fail utterly to take cognizance of advances in education and educational methods.” It is of course completely inconsistent to contend that the state of the art of psychiatry is too unreliable to be received as scientific opinion in the degree of guilt phase but completely acceptable and reliable as evidence in three other important phases of the trial: whether the defendant was sane or not at the time of the commission of the crime; whether the defendant was competent to stand trial; and what should be the appropriate sentence. Nor is it true that the M’Naghten Rule and the defense of diminished responsibility caunot coexist; on the contrary several jurisdictions have found the two completely compatible. See, e.g., People v. Henderson, supra; State v. DiPaolo, supra; Battalino v. People, supra; State v. Gramenz, supra.
It has been contended that the basis of the psychiatric evidence is the inherently unreliable self-serving *261statements made by the defendant. Initially it might be noted that the same potential infirmity exists in the area of determining sanity under the M’Naghten Rule as well as at the sentencing stage. Additionally such an assertion ignores the ability and expertise of trained psychiatrists to delineate candid admissions and elaborate fabrications. Indeed, one expert has frankly stated: “. . . the insane do not lie—they expose the truth with alarming candor.” Roche, Truth Telling, Psychiatric Expert Testimony and the Impeachment of Witnesses, 22 Pa. B.Q. 140, 146 (1951). Nor should there be any concern that the admission of such evidence will usurp the position of the judge and jury as the ultimate arbitrators of the defendant’s guilt or innocence. More realistically the effects of repudiating the Ahearn rule will be to better equip the finders of fact in their search for the truth.
Opponents of the defense of diminished responsibility have expressed concern that the effect of making such a defense cognizable will be shorter sentences for dangerous individuals. One proposal which answers such a concern is that proffered by a study done on the mentally disabled and the law completed by the American Bar Foundation: “The defense of partial responsibility should be available to defendants but the reduced prison confinement should be followed by a period of indeterminate hospitalization when necessary for the public safety. The defense should be allowed when the defendant was incapable of some mental process which is a necessary element of the definition of the crime charged. He should be held responsible and punished for the lesser but related crime which does not require that mental process. But, if he is suffering from a mental condition which predisposes the accused to continued criminal activity, he should be retained in a mental institution until his release is consistent *262with public safety.”5 An alternate and corrective procedure is available through the Mental Health and Retardation Act.6 Instead of a reduction in the degree of the crime the treatment of the defendant is provided under §413 of the Act: “Whenever any person charged with any crime is acquitted on the ground of insanity or having been insane at the time he committed the crime, the jury or the court as the case may be, shall state such reason for acquittal in its verdict, (b) In such event, the court may direct the Attorney for the Commonwealth to act as a petitioner to initiate commitment proceedings under section 406.” Section 406 permits, inter alia, an officer or agent of a governmental health or welfare organization or agency or “any responsible person” to bring the petition to commit any person in need of care.
The social objectives of our criminal statutes in general, and our murder statutes in particular, must be recalled. In most cases society is more interested in punishing the defendant’s state of mind than it is in punishing the defendant for the commission of the act itself. It is a general principle of our law “that the state of mind with which a person commits a criminal act is important in determining not only whether he should be punished therefor, but also, if he is to be punished, how severely.”7 For this reason an attempted crime is traditionally punished the same as the actual consummation of the crime itself. As reprehensible as the act in first degree murder is the state of mind that led to its commission. Nor would the social objectives of deterrence be accomplished by according the same sanction to those whose offense was “willful, deliberate *263and premeditated” and to those who were mentally incapable of deliberation and premeditation. As the report by the American Bar Foundation concluded: “If the objective of this heavier sanction be deterrence, it is doubtful that a person incapable of premeditation and deliberation will be dissuaded from committing a premeditated murder by the higher penalty imposed for murder accompanied by these mental processes. Nor is a ‘fully responsible’ person likely to be deterred because those who are incapable of premeditation also face the same punishment. If this differential treatment reflects a community attitude that ‘cold-blooded’ murder is somehow more culpable than killing which springs from momentary impulses, these traditional notions are actually undermined by inflicting the penalty reserved for the ‘cold-blooded’ on those capable only of the impulse.”8
I dissent.
Mr. Justice Pomeroy and Mr. Justice Jones join in this dissent.

 The statutory definition of murder in the first degree is: “All murder which shall be perpetrated by means of poison, or by lying in wait, or by any other kind of willful, deliberate and j>remeditated killing, or which shall be committed in the perpetration of, or attempting to perpetrate any arson, rape, robbery, burglary, or kidnapping, shall be murder in the first degree. All other kinds of murder shall be murder in the second degree.” Act of June 24, 1939, P. L. 872, as amended, 18 P.S. §4701. Since the Commonwealth did not allege that the murder in this case was committed by poison or while lying in wait or during the commission of a felony they had the burden of proving that the murder was “willful, deliberate and premeditated.”

 See, e.g., American Bar Foundation, The Mentally Disabled and the Law (1961) ; Menninger, The Crime of Punishment (1968) ; Kaplan, Punishment and Responsibility in Aquarius, 20 Buff. L. Rev. 181 (1970) ; Pourus, The Psychiatrist’s Role in Determining Accountability for Crimes; The Public Anxiety and an Increasing Expertise, 52 Marq. L. Rev. 380 (1969) ; Taylor, Partial Insanity as Affecting the Degree of Crime—A Commentary on Fisher v. United States, 34 Calif. L. Rev. 625 (1946) ; Weihofen and Overholser, Mental Disorder Affecting the Degree of a Crime, 56 Yale L.J. 959 (1946) ; Comment, Commonwealth v. Ahearn: Psychiatric Testimony Ruled Inadmissible in Murder Trial to Show Lack of Deliberation and Premeditation, 71 Dick. L. Rev. 100 (1966) ; Note, Diminished Responsibility and Psychiatric Testimony in Pennsylvania, 28 II. Pitt L. Rev. 679 (1967).

 Although the terms “partial” and “diminished” responsibility are the common vehicles used by writers and courts to describe the theory we discuss today, they are highly misleading. They connote that the defendant is somehow not fully responsible for his actions. In actuality the defendant is fully responsible, but only for a crime which does not require the elements of premeditation and deliberation. The terms will be employed here, not for their appropriateness but for their familiarity.

 Weihofen and Overholser, supra note 1 at 959.

 American Bar Foundation, supra note 1 at 367.

 Mental Health and Retardation Act of 1966, Special Sess. No. 3, October 20, P. L. 96, art. IV, §413, 50 P.S. §4413.

 Weihofen and Overholser, supra note 1 at 962.

 American Bar Foundation, supra note 1 at 356.