Court Opinion

ID: 9737454
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 19:25:36.105262+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:23:59.015773
License: Public Domain

WAHL, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
Substantial constitutional considerations require reconsideration of our decision in State v. Bouwman, 328 N.W.2d 703 (Minn.1982) which prohibits a criminal defendant from introducing expert psychiatric opinion evidence of mental abnormality or mental disorder to negate the requisite mens rea, in that case intent and premeditation. As the Supreme Court of Colorado has aptly stated, “A rule [of evidence] precluding the defendant from contesting the culpability element of the charge would render the prosecution’s evidence on that issue uncon-testable as a matter of law, in derogation of the presumption of innocence and the constitutional requirement of prosecutorial proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Hendershott v. People, 653 P.2d 385, 391 (Colo.1982); e.g., Sandstrom v. Montana, 442 U.S. 510, 520-24, 99 S.Ct. 2450, 2457-59, 61 L.Ed.2d 39 (1979); Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 274-75, 72 S.Ct. 240, 255-56, 96 L.Ed. 288 (1952). Requiring the prosecution to establish the culpable mental state beyond a reasonable doubt while, at the same time, prohibiting the defendant from presenting evidence to contest this issue is also a violation of due process. Hendershott v. People, 653 P.2d at 391.1
Our decision in Bouwman misconceived the nature of the defendant’s right to present evidence to negate an element of the offense charged:
* * * The defendant has the right to offer evidence which disputes the physical facts upon which the inference of the fact of intent is sought to be established by the prosecution. However, psychiatric evidence is of no value at this part of the trial since it does not relate to the physical evidence upon which the jury is to determine the issue of intent. Rather, such expert testimony relates to the mental capacity of the defendant and is properly part of defendant’s case wherein he must establish the defense of mental illness by the appropriate standard. (Emphasis added.)
Bouwman, 328 N.W.2d at 705.
As the Pohlot court has noted, “the mere fact that a defendant has the right to introduce psychiatric evidence in support of the affirmative defense of insanity does not justify barring the evidence from negating the government’s case in chief.” U.S. v. Pohlot, 827 F.2d at 901.
* * * The Supreme Court has indicated that although a state may constitutionally shift the burden of proving insanity to the defendant, Leland v. Oregon, 343 U.S. 790, 72 S.Ct. 1002, 96 L.Ed. 1302 (1952), it did not sanction, and probably would not sanction, a jury charge that prevented a jury from considering evidence of mental abnormality in determining whether the state had proven premeditation and deliberation beyond a reasonable doubt. In upholding the verdict, the Court stated: “It is apparent that the jury might have found appellant to have been mentally incapable of the premeditation and deliberation required to support a first degree murder verdict * * * and yet not have found him to have been legally insane.” Id. at 794, 72 S.Ct. at 1005 (Emphasis added.).

Id.

Both the ABA Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards, Standard 7-6.2 (1989), and the ALI Model Penal Code § 4.02(1) provide that evidence concerning a defendant’s mental condition should be admissible at a criminal trial whenever it is relevant to prove that a defendant did or did not have the state of mind required for the *767offense charged. This relevant evidence may often come in the form of properly qualified expert testimony. See Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards, Standard 7-6.2 commentary at 348 (1989).2
The defendant, in the case before us, admitted he committed the acts which resulted in the four deaths but sought to introduce expert psychiatric opinion to negate the element of premeditation. Premeditation, as this court has held, involves, in addition to the mere intent to kill, a pre-existing reflection and deliberation. See e.g., State v. Ulm, 326 N.W.2d 159 (Minn.1982); State v. Lemire, 315 N.W.2d 606 (Minn.1982). We have stated that inferences of pre-existing reflection and deliberation are properly drawn only from physical evidence. Bouwman, 328 N.W.2d at 705. It cannot be said, however, that direct inquiries into impaired mental states have no relevance or value in determining whether an individual did, in fact, reflect or deliberate on an act. It is conceivable that a person whose actions are steered by powerful mental aberrations may leave behind physical evidence indicating a pre-existing reflection and deliberation, but that when the mental condition is itself directly explored, the jury may find the inference of premeditation substantially rebutted. Dr. Malmquist’s proffered testimony was clearly relevant in determining the absence or presence of the requisite premeditation, under the circumstances of this case.3
A finding of premeditation is to be based upon the circumstances as a whole. State v. McCullum, 289 N.W.2d 89, 92 (Minn. 1979). Defendant’s mental impairment is as much a part of those circumstances as intoxication, infancy, senility and other conditions recognized by this court as probative of defendant’s state of mind. Although to some extent, conditions such as intoxication or infancy are capable of quantification, they, like mental illness, can only indicate the degree to which a condition impaired defendant’s mental processes4. All of these conditions acknowledge a mental disability of some type and all are probative as to whether a defendant formulated the required mens rea.
This court, in Bouwman, distinguished evidence of intoxication and infancy from evidence of mental impairment, adopting the reasoning of the ninth circuit:
Exposure to the effects of age and of intoxicants upon state of mind is a part of common human experience which fact finders can understand and apply; indeed, they would apply them even if the state did not tell them they could. The esoterics of psychiatry are not within the ordinary ken. The differences are sufficiently manifest to thwart constitutional attack.
Bouwman, 328 N.W.2d at 706 (quoting Wahrlich v. State, 479 F.2d 1137, 1138 (9th Cir.1973)).
If jurors’ inability to comprehend psychiatric testimony was ever a compelling distinction, it has no current application. Statistics indicate that one in seven adults in the United States suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder and is in need of professional treatment in any six month period of time. Regier, MD, et al, One-Month Prevalence of Mental Disorders in the United States, 45 Archives Gen’l Psychiatry 977, 981, Table 4 (November 1988). One in five adults in this country suffers from diagnosable mental illness at some point in their life time. Id. In a recent *768study, one in three adults in the United States reported that they or someone in their family have sought help from a psychiatrist or psychologist at sometime in their lives. Executive Summary, Public Attitudes Toward People with Chronic Mental Illness, Prepared for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on Chronic Mental Illness, at 2 (April 1990). In light of these statistics, there is little doubt that evidence of mental impairment is well within the common experience of the average person and capable of lay understanding.
Moreover, the jury, in the insanity phase of the bifurcated trial, relies on expert psychiatric testimony to determine whether defendant has proved by a preponderance of the evidence that at the time of the offense he or she “was laboring under such a defect of reason * * * as not to know the nature of the act, or that it was wrong.” Minn.Stat. § 611.026 (1990). The “esoter-ics” of psychiatry are no more beyond the ken of the jurors when they determine the presence or absence of the required mens rea in the guilt phase of the trial than when they determine the presence or absence of legal sanity in the insanity phase. We tolerate the “battle of experts” in other areas of the law but allow our distaste of such a battle to limit the rights of criminal defendants.
In Bouwman we mistakenly equated the evidentiary doctrine providing for the admission of evidence of mental abnormality to negate mens rea with the doctrine of diminished responsibility. “Diminished responsibility,” as the Commentary to Standard 7-6.2 describes it, is used most often to refer to sentencing rules that “accord mitigating impact to mental abnormality falling short of mental nonresponsibility [insanity] and not negating mens rea.” Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards, Standard 7-6.2 at 352.
It is argued that admitting non-insanity psychiatric evidence to negate the mens rea element of the crime will do violence to the system of bifurcation mandated by Minn.R. Crim.P. 20.02, subd. 2. Prior to the Bouw-man decision, however, the Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure, as adopted in 1975, afforded a unitary or bifurcated trial, at the option of the defendant. The rules were amended in 1984 to accommodate the holdings of Bouwman and State v. Hoffman, 328 N.W.2d 709 (Minn.1982), released the same day, which essentially mandated bifurcation. Reversal of Bouwman, on constitutional grounds, would signal the return to a rule which allows the defendant to make the critical and strategic decision whether to bifurcate the insanity phase of the trial.
I would reverse the convictions and remand for a new trial at which expert testimony as to defendant’s state of mind at the time of the killings in order to negate the state’s claim that he acted with premeditation would be admitted. This decision, as defendant’s counsel has so eloquently argued, would constitute nothing more than the reaffirmation of several concepts basic to our system of jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence and the due process requirement that the state prove each element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt and the defendant’s right to present relevant evidence in his defense.

. The normal requirements for expert opinion testimony include appropriate educational credentials and evaluation techniques and a showing that the opinion is based on "specialized knowledge which can assist the factfinder." Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards, Standard 7-3.10 introduction to commentary (1989).

. Commentators have recognized that a mental illness may negate the culpability element of a greater degree of a homicide offense but not of a lesser one, 1 Robinson, Criminal Law Defenses Sec. 64(a) at 273 (1984), and that if a subjective state of mind is an element of the crime, any testimony as to its existence or absence is relevant evidence; Arenella, The Diminished Capacity and Diminished Responsibility Defenses: Two Children of a Doomed Marriage, 77 Colum. L.Rev. 828, 833 (1977).

.One person with a blood alcohol level of .25 may be able to formulate specific intent, another incapable. One eight-year-old child may intend the consequences of her actions, another may not.