Court Opinion

ID: 9420775
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:55:56.886226+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.025863
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
joined by Mr. Justice Black,
dissenting.
However much conditions may have improved since 1905, when William H. (later Mr. Chief Justice) Taft expressed his disturbing conviction “that the administration of the criminal law in all the states in the Union (there may be one or two exceptions) is a disgrace to our civilization” (Taft, The Administration of Criminal Law, 15 Yale L. J. 1, 11), no informed person can be other than unhappy about the serious defects of present-day American criminal justice. It is not unthinkable that failure to bring the guilty to book for a heinous crime which deeply stirs popular sentiment may lead the legislature of a State, in one of those emotional storms which on occasion sweep over our people, to enact that thereafter an indictment for murder, following attempted rape, should be presumptive proof of guilt and cast upon the defendant the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he did not do the killing. Can there be any doubt that such a statute would go beyond the freedom of the States, under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, to fashion their own penal codes and their own procedures for enforcing them? Why is that so? Because from the time that the law which we have inherited has emerged from dark and barbaric times, the conception of justice which has dominated our criminal law has refused to put an accused at the hazard of punishment if he fails to remove every reasonable doubt of his innocence in the minds of jurors. It is the duty of the Government to establish his guilt beyond a rea*803sonable doubt. This notion — basic in our law and rightly one of the boasts of a free society — is a requirement and a safeguard of due process of law in the historic, procedural content of “due process.” Accordingly there can be no doubt, I repeat, that a State cannot cast upon an accused the duty of establishing beyond a reasonable doubt that his was not the act which caused the death of another.
But a muscular contraction resulting in a homicide does not constitute murder. Even though a person be the immediate occasion of another’s death, he is not a deo-dand to be forfeited like a thing in the medieval law. Behind a muscular contraction resulting in another’s death there must be culpability to turn homicide into murder.
The tests by which such culpability may be determined are varying and conflicting. One does not have to echo the scepticism uttered by Brian, C. J., in the fifteenth century, that “the devil himself knoweth not the mind of men” to appreciate how vast a darkness still envelopes man’s understanding of man’s mind. Sanity and insanity are concepts of incertitude. They are given varying and conflicting content at the same time and from time to time by specialists in the field. Naturally there has always been conflict between the psychological views absorbed by law and the contradictory views of students of mental health at a particular time. At this stage of scientific knowledge it would be indefensible to impose upon the States, through the due process of law which they must accord before depriving a person of life or liberty, one test rather than another for determining criminal culpability, and thereby to displace a State’s own choice of such a test, no matter how backward it may be in the light of the best scientific canons. Inevitably, the legal tests for determining the mental state on which criminal culpability is to be based are in strong conflict in our forty-*804eight States. But when a State has chosen its theory for testing culpability, it is a deprivation of life without due process to send a man to his doom if he cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the physical events of homicide did not constitute murder because under the State’s theory he was incapable of acting culpably.
This does not preclude States from utilizing common sense regarding mental irresponsibility for acts resulting in homicide — from taking for granted that most men are sane and responsible for their acts. That a man’s act is not his, because he is devoid of that mental state which begets culpability, is so exceptional a situation that the law has a right to devise an exceptional procedure regarding it. Accordingly, States may provide various ways for dealing with this exceptional situation by requiring, for instance, that the defense of “insanity” be specially pleaded, or that he on whose behalf the claim of insanity is made should have the burden of showing enough to overcome the assumption and presumption that normally a man knows what he is about and is therefore responsible for what he does, or that the issue be separately tried, or that a standing disinterested expert agency advise court and jury, or that these and other devices be used in combination. The laws of the forty-eight States present the greatest diversity in relieving the prosecution from proving affirmatively that a man is sane in the way it must prove affirmatively that the defendant is the man who pulled the trigger or struck the blow. Such legislation makes no inroad upon the basic principle that the State must prove guilt, not the defendant innocence, and prove it to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
For some unrecorded reason, Oregon is the only one of the forty-eight States that has made inroads upon that principle by requiring the accused to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the absence of one of the essential elements for the commission of murder, namely, culpability *805for his muscular contraction. Like every other State, Oregon presupposes that an insane person cannot be made to pay with his life for a homicide, though for the public good he may of course be put beyond doing further harm. Unlike every other State, however, Oregon says that the accused person must satisfy a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that, being incapable of committing murder, he has not committed murder.
Such has been the law of Oregon since 1864. That year the Code of Criminal Procedure defined murder in the conventional way, but it also provided: “When the commission of the act charged as a crime is proven, and the defence sought to be established is the insanity of the defendant, the same must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt . . . .” General Laws of Oregon, 1845-1864, p. 441 et seq., §§ 502, 204. The latter section, through various revisions, is the law of Oregon today and was applied in the conviction under review.
Whatever tentative and intermediate steps experience makes permissible for aiding the State in establishing the ultimate issues in a prosecution for crime, the State cannot be relieved, on a final show-down, from proving its accusation. To prove the accusation it must prove each of the items which in combination constitute the offense. And it must make such proof beyond a reasonable doubt. This duty of the State of establishing every fact of the equation which adds up to a crime, and of establishing it to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt is the decisive difference between criminal culpability and civil liability. The only exception is that very limited class of cases variously characterized as mala prohibita or public torts or enforcement of regulatory measures. See United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U. S. 277; Morissette v. United States, 342 U. S. 246. Murder is not a malum prohibitum or a public tort or the object of regulatory legislation. To suggest that the legal oddity by *806which Oregon imposes upon the accused the burden of proving beyond reasonable doubt that he had not the mind capable of committing murder is a mere difference in the measure of proof, is to obliterate the distinction between civil and criminal law.
It is suggested that the jury were charged not merely in conformity with this requirement of Oregon law but also in various general terms, as to the duty of the State to prove every element of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt, including in the case of first degree murder, "premeditation, deliberation, malice and intent.” Be it so. The short of the matter is that the Oregon Supreme Court sustained the conviction on the ground that the Oregon statute “casts upon the defendant the burden of proving the defense of insanity beyond a reasonable doubt.” State v. Leland, 190 Ore. 598, 638, 227 P. 2d 785, 802. To suggest, as is suggested by this Court but not by the State court, that, although the jury was compelled to act upon this requirement, the statute does not offend the Due Process Clause because the trial judge also indulged in a farrago of generalities to the jury about “premeditation, deliberation, malice and intent,” is to exact gifts of subtlety that not even judges, let alone juries, possess. See International Harvester Co. v. Kentucky, 234 U. S. 216, 223-224. If the Due Process Clause has any meaning at all, it does not permit life to be put to such hazards.
To deny this mode of dealing with the abuses of insanity pleas and with unedifying spectacles of expert testimony, is not to deprive Oregon of the widest possible choice of remedies for circumventing such abuses. The multiform legislation prevailing in the different States evinces the great variety of the experimental methods open to them for dealing with the problems raised by insanity defenses in prosecutions for murder.
*807To repeat the extreme reluctance with which I find a constitutional barrier to any legislation is not to mouth a threadbare phrase. Especially is deference due to the policy of a State when it deals with local crime, its repression and punishment. There is a gulf, however narrow, between deference to local legislation and complete disregard of the duty of judicial review which has fallen to this Court by virtue of the limits placed by the Fourteenth Amendment upon State action. This duty is not to be escaped, whatever I may think of investing judges with the power which the enforcement of that Amendment involves.