Court Opinion

ID: 9854666
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:11:14.294379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:23:12.837118
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frantz
dissenting:
For the first time so far as my research reveals, an attack is made upon a stock instruction which has uniformly been given in homicide cases. As early as 1895 in the case of Van Houton v. People, 22 Colo. 53, 43 Pac. 137, the instruction received the sanction of this court.
The instruction being assailed is Number 11, which defines first degree murder. In the course of the instruction the trial court charged the jury:
“ ‘Deliberation’ means an intent to kill, executed by the slayer in a cool state of blood, in furtherance of a formed design to gratify a feeling of revenge or to accomplish some other unlawful purpose, and not under the influence of a violent passion provoked by some cause calculated to override the judgment. ‘Premeditated design to kill’ means a previously designed or formed intention to kill. * * * The law * * * does not require that the willful intent, premeditation or deliberation should exist for any particular length of time before the killing. * * * No particular time need intervene between the formation of the intent to kill and the act of killing. It matters not how short the interval, if it was sufficient for one thought to follow another. It is sufficient if deliberation was had to form a design or-purpose to take life and to put that design or purpose into execution.”
In criminal law, responsibility is always relative. The standards of the ordinarily prudent man or of the normal person, commonly resorted to in the law concerning civil liability, have no application to criminal law. -
*589Thus understood, abstract statements of law set forth in a charge to the jury are laden with an element of danger and should not be given. Instructions should be framed in terms applicable to the particular case being considered. Gill v. People, 139 Colo. 401, 339 P. (2d) 1000; Harris v. People, 32 Colo. 211, 75 Pac. 427.
Here we are considering an instruction stated in the most general terms in a form truly abstract and in no manner appropriate to the case being considered.
Hammil is, according to the experts who testified, a very unstable person having below normal intelligence — in fact, a borderline intelligence, being just above the mental defective range. Moreover, he is suffering from a form of character disorder which might be called a sociopathic personality disorder.
In the light of the mental make-up of Hammil, the expert was asked on cross-examination whether it was medically and psychiatrically possible to form an intent to murder “as quickly as one thought follows another.” An objection to this question was sustained, and the sustention thereof is assigned as error.
An objection was also made to giving of the instruction advising the jury that it mattered not how short the interval might be in forming the intent, premeditation or deliberation, “if it was sufficient for one thought to follow another.” It was asserted that such instruction was confusing, misleading and self-contradictory; that it destroyed the distinction between first and second degree murder and that it stated an academic definition of murder in the first degree.
If we are to apply the standard that intent, premeditation and deliberation are processes which may require no interval of time but may be formed as quickly as one thought follows another, it should not be in a schoolmaster’s terms, as an exercise in cerebration. Again, let us remember that responsibility in criminal cases is always relative. Actually, the instruction would have been proper if couched in terms permitting the jury to *590consider the speed with which a thought of Hammil’s might follow another of his thoughts. Hammil is, without dispute in the evidence, a person of very low grade intelligence and his thought processes could properly be viewed by the jury as moving with less celerity than would be expected of a person of normal intelligence.
Certainly the speed with which one thought follows another in the mind of the “normal person” or the “ordinarily prudent man” is not the test. And yet, the jury in its deliberations may have considered responsibility in such a setting. It may have applied to Hammil the test of speed of the thought processes as such would be formed by a normally intelligent man.
Malice is sufficient to establish murder in the second degree. In order to establish murder in the first degree the ingredients of premeditation and deliberation must also be proved. It thus becomes obvious that the giving of this instruction was most important in determining whether Hammil committed first or second degree murder.
If the question put on cross-examination had been permitted an answer, the doctor might have shown that the intent, deliberation and premeditation could have been formed by Hammil as quickly as one thought follows another, but would be a much slower process than would occur in the average or intelligent person. The jury had the right to be advised on this and to evaluate its effect in arriving at its verdict.
An instruction very similar to the one given here was condemned in the case of McDonald v. State, 78 Miss. 369, 29 So. 171. The words discountenanced were: “if the design to kill exists but for an instant.” The entire disapproved instruction reads as follows:
“The court instructs you, for the state, that, while premeditation and malice aforethought are necessary ingredients in the crime of murder, this does not mean hatred or ill will, but means the same in law as deliberate design, and need not exist in the mind of the slayer *591for any definite time, — not for days or hours, or even minutes; but, if the design to kill exists but for an instant at the very time the fatal blow was struck, this is sufficient premeditation to constitute the offense.”
An interesting discussion of some phases of this problem can be found in 46 Col. L. Rev. 1005 under the title, “Premeditation and Mental Capacity,” and in 1 Wharton, Criminal Law and Procedure, §41, p. 92, under the subheading, “Subnormal Mentality.”
Because of these matters, I would urge my confreres to reverse the judgment in this case.