Court Opinion

ID: 9433327
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:39:52.738545+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:40.674016
License: Public Domain

Justice Ginsburg,
concurring in the judgment.
The Court divides in this case on a question of characterization. The State’s law, Mont. Code Ann. § 45-2-203 (1995), *57prescribes that voluntary intoxication “may not be taken into consideration in determining the existence of a mental state which is an element of [a criminal] offense.” For measurement against federal restraints on state action, how should we type that prescription? If §45-2-203 is simply a rule designed to keep out “relevant, exculpatory evidence,” Justice O’Connor maintains, post, at 67, Montana’s law offends due process. If it is, instead, a redefinition of the mental-state element of the offense, on the other hand, Justice O’Connor’s due process concern “would not be at issue,” post, at 71, for “[a] state legislature certainly has the authority to identify the elements of the offenses it wishes to punish,” post, at 64, and to exclude evidence irrelevant to the crime it has defined.
Beneath the labels (rule excluding evidence or redefinition of the offense) lies the essential question: Can a State, without offense to the Federal Constitution, make the judgment that two people are equally culpable where one commits an act stone sober, and the other engages in the same conduct after his voluntary intoxication has reduced his capacity for self-control? For the reasons that follow, I resist categorizing §45-2-203 as merely an evidentiary prescription, but join the Court’s judgment refusing to condemn the Montana statute as an unconstitutional enactment.
Section 45-2-203 does not appear in the portion of Montana’s Code containing evidentiary rules (Title 26), the expected placement of a provision regulating solely the admissibility of evidence at trial. Instead, Montana’s intoxication statute appears in Title 45 (“Crimes”), as part of a chapter entitled “General Principles of Liability.” Mont. Code Ann., Tit. 45, ch. 2 (1995). No less than adjacent provisions governing duress and entrapment, §45-2-203 embodies a legislative judgment regarding the circumstances under which individuals may be held criminally responsible for their actions.
*58As urged by Montana and its amici, § 45-2-203 “extracts] the entire subject of voluntary intoxication from the mens rea inquiry,” Reply Brief for Petitioner 2, thereby rendering evidence of voluntary intoxication logically irrelevant to proof of the requisite mental state. Thus, in a prosecution for deliberate homicide, the State need not prove that the defendant “purposely or knowingly cause[d] the death of another,” Mont. Code Ann. §45-5-102(a) (1995), in a purely subjective sense. To obtain a conviction, the prosecution must prove only that (1) the defendant caused the death of another with actual knowledge or purpose, or (2) that the-defendant killed “under circumstances that would otherwise establish knowledge or purpose ‘but for’ [the defendant’s] voluntary intoxication.” Brief for American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities et al. as Amici Curiae 6. See also Brief for Petitioner 35-36; Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 10-12. Accordingly, § 45-2-203 does not “lighte[n] the prosecution’s burden to prove [the] mental-state element beyond a reasonable doubt,” as Justice O’Connor suggests, post, at 64, for “[t]he applicability of the reasonable-doubt standard ... has always been dependent on how a State defines the offense that is charged,” Patterson v. New York, 432 U. S. 197, 211, n. 12 (1977).
Comprehended as a measure redefining mens rea, § 45-2-203 encounters no constitutional shoal. States enjoy wide latitude in defining the elements of criminal offenses, see, e. g., Martin v. Ohio, 480 U. S. 228, 232 (1987); Patterson, 432 U. S., at 201-202, particularly when determining “the extent to which moral culpability should be a prerequisite to conviction of a crime,” Powell v. Texas, 392 U. S. 514, 545 (1968) (Black, J., concurring). When a State’s power to define criminal conduct is challenged under the Due Process Clause, we inquire only whether the law “offends some principle of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental.” Patterson, 432 U. S., at 202 (internal quotation marks omitted). Defining mens . *59rea to eliminate the exculpatory value of voluntary intoxication does not offend a “fundamental principle of justice,” given the lengthy common-law tradition, and the adherence of a significant minority of the States to that position today. See ante, at 43-49; see also post, at 73 (Souter, J., dissenting) (“[A] State may so define the mental element of an offense that evidence of a defendant’s voluntary intoxication at the time of commission does not have exculpatory relevance and, to that extent, may be excluded without raising any issue of due process.”).
Other state courts have upheld statutes similar to § 45-2-203, not simply as evidentiary rules, but as legislative redefinitions of the mental-state element. See State v. Souza, 72 Haw. 246, 249, 813 P. 2d 1384, 1386 (1991) (“legisla6ure was entitled to redefine the mens rea element of crimes and to exclude evidence of voluntary intoxication to negate state of mind”); State v. Ramos, 133 Ariz. 4, 6, 648 P. 2d 119, 121 (1982) (“Perhaps the state of mind which needs to be proven here is a watered down mens rea; however, this is the prerogative of the legislature.”); Commonwealth v. Rumsey, 309 Pa. Super. 137, 139, 454 A. 2d 1121, 1122 (1983) (quoting Powell, 392 U. S., at 536 (plurality opinion)) (“Redefinition of the kind and quality of mental activity that constitutes the mens rea element of crimes is a permissible part of the legislature’s role in the ‘constantly shifting adjustment between the evolving aims of the criminal law and changing religious, moral, philosophical, and medical views of the nature of man.’ ”). Legislation of this order, if constitutional in Arizona, Hawaii, and Pennsylvania, ought not be declared unconstitutional by this Court when enacted in Montana.
If, as the plurality, Justice O’Connor, and Justice Sou-ter agree, it is within the legislature’s province to instruct courts to treat a sober person and a voluntarily intoxicated person as equally responsible for conduct — to place a voluntarily intoxicated person on a level with a sober person— then the Montana law is no less tenable under the Federal *60Constitution than are the laws, with no significant difference in wording, upheld in sister States.1 The Montana Supreme Court did not disagree with the courts of other States; it simply did not undertake an analysis in line with the principle that legislative enactments plainly capable of a constitutional construction ordinarily should be given that construction. See Edward J. DeBartolo Corp. v. Florida Gulf Coast Building & Constr. Trades Council, 485 U. S. 568, 575 (1988); State v. Lilburn, 265 Mont. 258, 266, 875 P. 2d 1036, 1041 (1994).
The Montana Supreme Court’s judgment, in sum, strikes down a statute whose text displays no constitutional infirmity. If the Montana court considered its analysis forced by this Court’s precedent,2 it is proper for this Court to say *61what prescriptions federal law leaves to the States,3 and thereby dispel confusion to which we may have contributed, and attendant state-court misperception.

Justice Breyer questions the States’ authority to treat voluntarily intoxicated and sober defendants- as equally culpable for their actions. See post, at 80. He asks, moreover, post, at 79-80, why a legislature concerned with the high incidence of crime committed by individuals in an alcohol-impaired condition would choose the course Montana and several other States have taken. It would be more sensible, he suggests, to “equate voluntary intoxication [with] knowledge, and purpose,” post, at 80, thus dispensing entirely with the mens rea requirement when individuals act under the influence of a judgment-impairing substance. It does not seem to me strange, however, that States have resisted such a catchall approach and have enacted, instead, a measure less sweeping, one that retains a mens rea requirement, but “define[s] culpable mental state so as to give voluntary intoxication no exculpatory relevance.” See post, at 75 (Souter, J., dissenting). Nor is it at all clear to me that “a jury unaware of intoxication would likely infer knowledge or purpose” in the example Justice Breyer provides, post, at 79. .It is not only in fiction, see J. Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1983) (originally published in The Neiu Yorker in 1939), but, sadly, in real life as well, that sober people drive while daydreaming or otherwise failing to pay attention to the road.

 The United States, as amicus curiae, so suggested at oral argument. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 20 (“[T]he State court never really got to the question of whether there has been a [substantive] change in the State law, because it [assumed] that, to the extent that there had been one, it was barred by [In re Winship, 397 U. S. 358 (1970)].”).

 As the United States observed, it is generally within the States’ domain “to determine what are the elements of criminal responsibility.” Id., at 19-20.