Court Opinion

ID: 9730075
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:00:25.478632+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:03.956198
License: Public Domain

Concurring Opinion by
Mr. Chief Justice Bell:
I join in the excellent Opinion of the Court written by Justice Eagen. The lower Court correctly admitted in evidence and the majority Opinion correctly holds that the testimony of defendant’s psychiatrists, who admitted defendant knew the difference between right and wrong, was not admissible for the purpose of determining innocence or guilt, but was admissible in considering the sentence or penalty: Commonwealth v. Ahearn, 421 Pa. 311, 218 A. 2d 561.
For many years, psychiatrists have attempted to change the law involving murder and are constantly adopting different psychiatric ideas and terminology to express and justify their beliefs that a criminal is a sick person but not a criminal. As this Court said in Commonwealth v. Ahearn, 421 Pa., supra (pp. 320, 321, quoting from Commonwealth v. Tyrrell, 405 Pa. 210, pp. 219, 221) : “ ‘The doctrine of “irresistible impulse” or in the modern psychiatric vernacular “inability to control one’s self”, whether used to denote legal *280insanity, or as a device to escape criminal responsibility for .one’s acts or to reduce the crime or its degree, has always been rejected in Pennsylvania . . . “Certainly neither social maladjustment, nor lack of self-control, nor impulsiveness, nor psycho-neurosis, nor emotional instability, nor chronic malaria, nor all of such conditions combined, constitute insanity within the criminal-law conception of that term.” [Emphasis in original]’”
As Chief Justice Horace Stern so pertinently said in Commonwealth v. Neill, 362 Pa. 507, 67 A. 2d 276, where the Court rejected the defense that confusional insanity amounted to legal insanity (pp. 513-514, 514-515) : “Apart from the fact that ‘confusional insanity? is apparently an antiquated and discarded theory and that the proposition that there could be such a thing as a momentary insanity was sharply challenged by an expert witness for the Commonwealth, it would seem quite obvious that defendant’s witness failed to differentiate between a mere temporary frenzy or emotional excitation, and insanity within the legal meaning of that term, namely, inability, from disease of the mind, to understand the nature and quality of the act and to distinguish between right and wrong with respect to it: Commonwealth v. Szachewicz, 303 Pa. 410, 416, 417, 154 A. 483, 484, 485; Commonwealth v. Lockard, 325 Pa. 56, 60, 188 A. 755, 757.
. . Certainly neither social maladjustment, nor lack of self-control, nor impulsiveness, nor psychoneurosis, nor emotional instability, nor chronic malaria, nor all of such conditions combined, constitute insanity within the criminal-law conception of that term.”
The dissenting Opinion proves too much, so much in fact that it disproves its own theory. It completely overlooks or completely ignores the testimony of defendant’s psychiatrists, who admit defendant knew the difference between right and wrong and the legal con*281sequences of his criminal actions. They testified that “He told us that his feelings of needing to kill had been present for as long as he could remember. He regrets that he was not in the Marine Corps during the war because he said that he would have felt better if he could have killed twelve or fifteen people. . . . He is a thoroughly dangerous human being who . . . can be expected to kill at any time that he is under . . . sufficient emotional pressure . . . and his sickness of mind is so strong that he is not free to act . . . before the strength of his destructive almost animalistic drive and almost delight in killing.” How can the dissenting Opinion ignore this testimony! How can the dissenting Opinion argue that defendant did not have the ingredient and hallmark of a nonfelony first degree murder, viz., a specific intent to kill, just because his intent to kill was uncontrollable!
I express, with great restraint, my conviction that the psychiatric test advocated in the dissenting Opinion (1) would turn over to psychiatrists, instead of to Courts and juries, the determination of criminal responsibility and murder, and (2) would whitewash and release nearly every murderer, and (3) would make the safety and protection of law-abiding citizens from the (admittedly) most dangerous killers — i.e., those whom the psychiatrists say have an uncontrollable urge to kill — a travesty.