Court Opinion

ID: 9667398
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 01:44:38.245943+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:37.632715
License: Public Domain

WAHL, Justice
(concurring specially).
I do not disagree with the result in this case. However, for reasons set out in my dissent in State v. Bouwman, 328 N.W.2d 703 (Minn.1982), released today, I strongly disagree with the holding of the majority that the trial court committed no error by instructing the jury that the testimony of defense witnesses as to the defendant’s mental state at the time of the death of Carol Hoffman could not be considered on the issues of premeditation and intent but only on the question of whether the defendant knew the nature of his act and whether he knew the act was wrong.
While the instruction was not prejudicial to defendant, there being ample evidence otherwise of premeditation and intent, it is, to my mind, an incorrect statement of the law. To hold that a defendant charged with murder in the first degree may not offer relevant and competent expert psychiatric opinion testimony on the issues of premeditation and specific intent is to violate the defendant’s constitutional right to present evidence. Washington v. Texas, 388 U.S. 14, 18-19, 87 S.Ct. 1920, 1922-23, 18 L.Ed.2d 1019 (1967); Hughes v. Mathews, 576 F.2d 1250, 1255-56 (7th Cir.1978), cert. dismissed sub nom. Israel, Warden v. Hughes, 439 U.S. 801, 99 S.Ct. 43, 58 L.Ed.2d 94 (1978).
I also strongly disapprove of the majority’s wholesale amendment of the Rules of Criminal Procedure with regard to the trial of criminal cases where the defendant has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental illness but has not elected to bifurcate the trial as provided by Minn.R.Crim.P. 20. The new untested procedure will not only compound the confusion, as Justice Scott notes in his special concurrence, it will confound the criminal law bar, whose members have a right to expect that an amendment of such magnitude would go through the Criminal Rules Committee charged with monitoring those rules and be the subject of hearing and debate before this court before adoption.