Court Opinion

ID: 9420867
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:11.921464+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.376503
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Black and Mr. Justice Douglas join,
dissenting.*
Ever since our ancestral common law emerged out of the darkness of its early barbaric days, it has been a postulate of Western civilization that the taking of life by the hand of an insane person is not murder. But the nature and operation of the mind are so elusive to the grasp of the understanding that the basis for formulating standards of criminal responsibility and the means for determining whether those standards are satisfied in a particular case have greatly troubled law and medicine for more than a century. See Glueck, Mental Disorder and The Criminal Law (1925); Abrahamsen, Crime and the Human Mind (1944); Overholser, The Psychiatrist and the Law (to be published in April 1953 by Harcourt Brace & Co.) (particularly Chapter II). To this day, conflict and controversy regarding these problems bedevil the administration of criminal justice. See, e. g., Fisher v. United States, 328 U. S. 463. The deep concern engendered in England just the other day by the case of John Thomas Straffen strikingly disclosed *571the unsatisfactory state of the law. See The Times, July 22, 1952, p. 3; July 23, 1952, p. 4; July 24, 1952, p. 3; July 25, 1952, p. 3; July 26, 1952, p. 7; August 30, 1952, pp. 2, 5; September 1, 1952, p. 5; September 4, 1952, p. 5; September 12, 1952, p. 7; The Economist, August 30, 1952, p. 494; and The Lancet, August 2, 1952, p. 239. (Especially comments subsequent to the action of the' Home Secretary, which followed dismissal of Straffen’s appeal by the Court of Criminal Appeal in Regina v. Straffen, [1952] 2 Q. B. 911.)
The law of Pennsylvania in the abstract on this controversial subject is clear and unassailable. “It is a principle embedded in the common law — and we administer the common law in Pennsylvania — that no insane person can be tried, sentenced or executed.” Commonwealth ex rel. Smith v. Ashe, 364 Pa. 93, 116, 71 A. 2d 107, 118. In view of the fallibilities of human judgment regarding the same body of evidence, it is inevitable that one may be doubtful, and even more than doubtful, whether in a particular case a plea of insanity was properly rejected. It is not for this Court to find a want of due process in a conviction for murder sustained by the highest court of the State merely because a finding that the defendant is sane may raise the gravest doubts. But it is our duty under the Fourteenth Amendment to scrutinize the procedure by which the plea of insanity failed and defendant’s life became forfeit. A denial of adequate opportunity to sustain the plea of insanity is a denial of the safeguard of due process in its historical procedural sense which is within the incontrovertible scope of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
One has only to read the opinions both of the four Judges who constituted the majority of the Court of Appeals and of the three dissenters to appreciate the tangled skein of procedural complexities in which the defendant in this case was hopelessly caught. 192 F. 2d *572540. And I cannot read the opinion of Chief Judge Biggs, id., at 549, without being left with such an unrelievable feeling of disquietude as amounts to a conviction that the accused in this case was deprived of a fair opportunity to establish his insanity. And this not the less so because the deprivation resulted from the tangled web that was woven for the defendant, even if unwittingly, by the courts of Pennsylvania.
But I am of the view that there is another reason, which in itself is for me conclusive, why this Court should not affirm the judgment below. It is that a new decisive factor, which was introduced for the first time here, requires reconsideration of the disposition below. After the case left the Court of Appeals it came to the knowledge of petitioner’s counsel that the court-appointed expert, the professional witness on the issue of insanity on whose testimony the Pennsylvania courts relied, had himself been committed, as of January 12, 1952, because of an incurable mental disease which had deprived him of “any judgment or insight.” This fact was brought to the notice of this Court in an affidavit not challenged by the respondent, which also averred that “this intellectual deterioration was evidenced even on a clinical level in January, 1951.” The expert’s report on Smith’s sanity was made to the sentencing court on November 5, 1948. His disability was not known either to the District Court or the Court of Appeals in February and October, 1951, when they respectively ruled against the petitioner. Even uninformed judges may know that this kind of mental illness does not set in overnight but is the culmination of a long process. Indeed, the medical history, sketchy as it is, revealed by the affidavit filed here demonstrates the gradual manner in which the mental illness in question developed. The extent to which this affidavit vitiates the worth of the expert testimony taken by the sentencing court should not be made a mat*573ter of judicial notice. But to allow the victim of this testimony, which, in any event, has been brought into doubt, to go to his death without an opportunity for reassessment, by either State or federal court, of the basis for the rejection of his plea of insanity would constitute a denial of due process no less gross than if the sentence had been imposed without any hearing at all on the issue of sanity.
I need hardly point out that in a court of equity causes are disposed of on the facts as they appear at the time of the disposition, and that habeas corpus is certainly to be governed by the rules of fairness enforced in equity. The cause should, therefore, be remanded to the District Court for disposition of the new matter revealed in the affidavit filed here.
The Court does not reach this issue. Therefore I do not now decide whether this evidence raises a new ground which must first, under principles of exhaustion, be presented in the State courts or whether the federal court may properly view it simply as new evidence bearing on a claim already exhausted — that the determination of sanity was inadequate.

[See also opinion of Mr. Justice Frankfurter in Brown v. Allen, ante, p. 488, which also applies to this case.]