Court Opinion

ID: 9542810
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:39:02.596906+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:09:01.911240
License: Public Domain

STEWART, Justice,
dissenting:
¶ 54 I dissent in today’s opinion for the same reasons I dissented in State v. Herrera, 895 P.2d 359 (Utah 1995). For centuries the insanity defense has been recognized in Anglo-American law. See id. at 371 (Stewart, J., dissenting, joined by Durham, J.). That defense rests on the fundamental principle that human beings have free will and that society should punish only those capable of acting in a responsible manner — a concept that lies at the core of American civilization and its institutions of freedom. See id. at 372-74. Perhaps my view is provincial, but I submit that it is shocking and astonishing that this state, given its particular history and professed principles, and its Legislature and highest court, should undeimine those principles.
¶ 55 Under Utah Code Ann. § 76-2-301(1), it makes no difference how deranged a defendant’s mind may be — whether caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, organic brain disease, medications, or some other cause — as to whether he may be criminally punished. Of course, those with some status or influence in the community will be spared the harshest consequences. Those with no status or influence may not be spared.
¶ 56 Justice Felix Frankfurter of the United States Supreme Court wrote:
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.
United States v. Baldi, 344 U.S. 561, 570, 73 S.Ct. 391, 396, 97 L.Ed. 549 (1953), quoted in Herrera I, 895 P.2d at 371 (Stewart, J., dissenting, joined by Durham, J.).
¶ 57 I repeat what I said in my Hem'era I dissent:
Today’s majority opinion and the statute it sustains represent a monumental departure from, and rejection of, one of the most fundamental principles of Anglo-American criminal law that has existed for centuries. For the first time in this state’s history, and, with two exceptions, for the first time in the nation’s history, this Court now holds that an insane person who commits an act prohibited by the criminal law is as guilty as a sane person and may be imprisoned, and even executed, as if he were a fully responsible sane person. I submit that the Court fails to perceive the extent to which fundamental constitutional principles and values have been violated by its affirmance of Utah Code Ann. § 76-2-305(1). The decision flouts centuries-old legal principles of personal responsibility that evolved from Judeo-Christian moral and ethical concepts and from an expanding knowledge of the causes of human behavior. Basic precepts of state and federal due process of law, equal protection of the law, and the cruel and unusual punishment provisions in the state and federal constitutions prohibit legislative action imposing such inhuman treatment on persons whose mental faculties are so deranged that rational, morally responsible conduct is not possible.
Herrera I, 895 P.2d at 371-72 (Stewart, J., dissenting, joined by Durham, J.).
¶ 58 In the instant case, the majority goes to great lengths to show that defendant knew that what he was doing was wrong. Perhaps the Court is correct; however, because of the statute, defendant’s conduct has been analyzed in an unrealistic manner. In any event, under the statute that this Court has now sustained, a person’s knowledge of right and wrong and his or her ability to conform them conduct to those standards is irrelevant to a conviction. In essence, Utah law now *869allows human beings to be dealt with as if they were wholly amoral robots.
¶ 59 In my view, there has never been an instance in the jurisprudential history of this state in which this Court has wandered so far from the moral principles embedded in the fundamental constitutional precepts established by the framers of our federal and state constitutions.